In our quest to find the 10 easiest and hardest countries to conquer we have come across many surprising names. Countries like Indonesia (amongst the top 20 in the hardest countries to conquer) should not just be considered just a tourist spot but a force to reckon with. Do you think countries with king or queens are the harder to conquer? Our post 10 countries that have a king or queen might help you with the answer. For now, the big question is how we rank the easiest and hardest countries to conquer. The answer to this is not an easy one but here is a brief of the methodology we used.
The first ranking criterion that we have used is the strength of the armed forces. For this we have used the Global Firepower List of 126 countries, which is based on over 50 factors that elaborate a country’s power index. To make smaller countries, with limited resources able to compete with larger countries, the Global Firepower list has ignored many factors like nuclear capability, a number of weapons’ systems, leadership status, etc. Countries that don’t have an active Navy have not been penalized for the fact. The research, however, takes into account geographical factors, availability of natural resources, the strength of the economy, etc.
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Our second criterion is the GDP. The military strength alone is not enough to defend a country if it is not backed by a strong economy. Nations at war require a huge amount of money to feed its citizens and provide its military with whatever supplies they need during a conflict. There are countries like Pakistan that are militarily very strong but when it comes to the economy, they are a sad story. India to some extent has a similar fate. To get the names of the strongest and weakest economies in the world, we have used a data set from World Bank, which has ranked the countries according to their GDP.
No country can win a war or defend its borders if it’s politically unstable. Imagine what would happen to a country which is a nuclear power but it filled with dissidents? Such a nation would be a threat to itself as well as to the whole world. Therefore, our third criterion for the 10 easiest and hardest countries to conquer is the political stability of a nation. For this we have used the Fragile State Index, which takes into account factors like government’s control over its territories, quality of public services, economic stability, corruption, etc.
Insider Monkey has picked the least and top performing states in each category and then averaged out the result to get the unique ranking. Now, without any further ado let’s discover the list of 10 easiest countries to conquer.
