Peacekeepers Need Peacemakers

Peacekeeping missions are often criticized, but rarely do critics imagine what the world would be like in their absence. In fact, multiple studies have shown that peacekeeping missions are one of the most effective tools the UN Security Council has at its disposal to prevent the expansion of war, stop atrocities, and make it more likely that peace agreements endure. In a comprehensive 2021 meta-analysis of peacekeeping operations presented in this magazine, the political scientists Barbara F. Walter, Lise Morjé Howard, and V. Page Fortna found that “peacekeeping not only works at stopping conflicts but works better than anything else experts know,” and “at a very low cost. . . . Conflict zones with peacekeeping missions produce less armed conflict and fewer deaths than zones without them.” The “relationship between peacekeeping and lower levels of violence is so consistent,” the authors concluded, that it ought to be considered “one of the most robust findings in international relations research.”

Today, however, the challenges facing UN Peacekeeping are greater than ever. Currently, the United Nations has 11 peacekeeping missions deployed around the globe—missions that are making extraordinary contributions to containing violence amid a surge in conflict worldwide. In the Golan Heights and Cyprus, peacekeepers are monitoring and preserving cease-fires. In the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan, they are protecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable civilians. In the context of escalating exchanges of fire between Israel and Lebanon following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, the UN Peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon has worked to help avert escalations beyond those that have occurred throughout the ten-month conflict. Preserving cease-fires, protecting civilians, and containing violence are among the intermediate goals of peacekeeping, which also include mediating local conflicts and strengthening local institutions.

But the ultimate objectives of all peacekeeping operations are political. Such operations’ primary goal is to resolve conflicts by helping quarreling parties reach and implement the kind of agreements that help establish durable peace that outlasts the presence of peacekeepers. As the head of the UN’s peacekeeping efforts, however, I can attest that recent developments make it extremely challenging for UN Peacekeeping missions to accomplish these long-term goals. More and more, conflict is driven by armed groups that operate across national borders, weaponize cheap technologies such as improvised explosive devices, spew hate speech online, engage in terrorism and transnational organized crime, and often lack any political ambition beyond sparking disorder. Although the practice of peacekeeping must adapt to meet these daunting challenges, there is only so much peacekeeping can do on its own.

The iconic blue helmets’ ability to successfully complete their missions also depends on the political will of the UN member states. And today, these countries are increasingly divided, their attention and resources split among multiple crises. Insufficient political support from UN member states has made enabling conflict to come to a lasting end a distant prospect for many UN Peacekeeping missions. Without more coordinated support from member states, missions are often limited to doing damage control—preventing conflicts from spiraling out of control rather than resolving them.

To empower UN Peacekeeping missions to move from managing to resolving conflicts, two changes must occur. First, the practice of peacekeeping will need to adapt more quickly to evolving threats that exacerbate conflict, such as transnational organized crime, climate change, misinformation, and digital technologies such as drones and AI. Second, and even more important, UN member states need to provide stronger and more unified support to peacekeeping missions—particularly to the peace processes that they seek to advance in the countries in which they serve. All UN Peacekeeping operations are designed to support peace agreements between parties to a conflict. But UN member states often need to exert their own pressure to encourage adversaries to reach or implement an agreement—especially as conflict flares anew worldwide.

DISTURBANCE OF THE PEACE

In 1948, just a year and a half after the UN itself was founded, the UN launched its first peacekeeping mission—to maintain the cease-fire that ended the Arab-Israeli War. The first armed peacekeeping mission came eight years after that, when the deployment of 6,000 lightly armed UN peacekeeping troops to the Egyptian-Israeli border helped end the Suez Crisis. In 1992 and 1993, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia facilitated an end to the country’s devastating civil war, including by organizing a successful election. In Côte d’Ivoire between 2004 to 2017 and in Liberia between 2003 and 2018, UN Peacekeeping missions supported the end of civil war and a return to constitutional order.

Three major factors contributed to the success of peacekeeping in those countries. The first was strong leadership by the UN Security Council. That allowed for the creation of new peacekeeping initiatives such as a governance and economic management assistance program in Liberia, which sought to address the governance deficits at the root of the conflict, and a certification mandate in Cote d’Ivoire that helped bring a 2011 post-election crisis to a peaceful resolution. Both countries’ peace processes benefited from a coalition of international and regional partners working to end the conflicts. Peacekeepers had a designated role supporting the implementation of the political agreements. And the proactive efforts of Liberian and Ivorian leaders and citizens themselves were crucial: no peacekeeping operation or international partner can substitute for a host government’s determination to fulfill its responsibilities.

Over the past two decades, however, most UN Peacekeeping operations have also been hampered by a discrepancy between their capacities and what the Security Council and the host countries expect them to accomplish. Peacekeeping missions’ budgets often prove inadequate to achieve their mandated tasks. The $5.59 billion budget that the UN General Assembly approved for peacekeeping operations worldwide constitutes just 0.3 percent of global military spending. It is far less than the approximately $11 billion that New York City budgeted for its police department in 2024, even though UN Peacekeeping maintains 20,000 more personnel. These budgetary constraints mean that often, peacekeepers are also unevenly and inadequately trained and provisioned.

With conflicts increasing in number and severity, UN member states’ resources are understandably stretched. Despite these constraints, UN Peacekeeping has continued to deliver on its intermediate goals of preserving cease-fires and protecting civilians. But being confined to addressing intermediate goals means that peacekeeping operations now sometimes withdraw from a country before durable peace is achieved, which in some instances means leaving such countries vulnerable to tipping back into conflict. At other times, the missions remain in place with little prospect of establishing durable peace.

Peacekeeping missions in Africa are particularly impaired by the dangerous combination of very broad, detailed, and ambitious mandates paired with resource limitations and a lack of strong, unified UN member state support. Peacekeeping principles dictate that even when the Security Council mandates UN Peacekeeping missions to protect civilians, they may use force only in self-defense and defense of their mandate. But when a peacekeeping operation lingers in a situation that has little prospect of progressing politically toward peace, local authorities and populations tend to become less accepting of the peacekeepers’ presence. This frustration is ripe for exploitation by groups who benefit from instability and use disinformation as just one of many weapons against peacekeeping missions, as well as local populations.

RIGHT OF SUPPORT

The UN’s peacekeeping operations can only ever be as strong as the support of UN member states. But against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tensions as well as shifting global and regional alliances, peacekeeping operations are increasingly unable to rely on the UN member states to act in a unified manner to support peacekeepers’ political efforts. Many member states certainly are stepping up by actively encouraging the parties to a conflict to work toward a political settlement. And the large majority of UN member states continue to strongly support UN Peacekeeping writ large—support that was demonstrated at the 2023 Peacekeeping Ministerial Meeting in Ghana. The Security Council also continues to extend the mandates of peacekeeping operations, although with more limited unanimity.

Mostly absent, however, are the kind of broader coalitions of member states that would undergird UN peacekeepers’ efforts. In some cases, member states simply are not engaging enough to back the political processes that peacekeeping operations are mandated to support. Take South Sudan: the situation there is increasingly unstable, driven in part by the dire conflict in Sudan. At this fragile moment, UN member states need to send strong messages pressuring the political players to keep their commitment to the peace agreement.

In other cases, member states have been sending conflicting messages to the parties to the conflict. With respect to Mali, for example, Security Council member states were united for many years around shared political objectives for the country, including the ones that guided the UN peacekeeping mission’s mandate. Over the past several years, however, that unity frayed, and Mali became terrain where competition over strategy between the most influential member states prevailed. This only compounded the challenges that the peacekeeping mission already faced as a result of the increasing prevalence of terrorism in the region. The peacekeeping mission’s presence became untenable, and in mid-2023 the Malian government requested that the mission withdraw.

The extent to which these conditions impair peacekeeping from supporting durable solutions to conflict must not be interpreted as a failure of the tool of peacekeeping. Skeptics about the value and impact of peacekeeping must ask: Is there a realistic better alternative to securing peace? What would happen in regions racked by conflict if peacekeeping operations were not there? Haiti’s tragic descent into chaos showcases how peacekeeping cannot accomplish its ultimate goals without a strong political process implemented in parallel—and demonstrates the dangers of withdrawing peacekeepers before durable peace has been achieved. The UN Peacekeeping mission deployed to Haiti between 2004 and 2017 had many serious shortcomings. But it successfully secured Haitians the most basic security. It also assisted Haiti in rebuilding its infrastructure after its catastrophic 2010 earthquake. In 2019, peacekeepers had to withdraw. Since then, the world has sadly witnessed the country spiral into a multidimensional crisis, with devastating impacts on the lives of ordinary Haitian people.

STRENGTH THROUGH PEACE

Member states themselves must recommit to peacekeeping. Along with providing more realistic, focused, and prioritized mandates and peacekeeping budgets that match these mandates’ goals, member states must place diplomatic pressure on the parties to the conflicts.

For peace operations to remain a relevant tool in an increasingly chaotic age, peacekeeping itself must change, too. In 2018, UN Secretary-General António Guterres laid out a broad initiative, Action for Peacekeeping, to improve peacekeeping missions, including by monitoring troops’ performance and accountability, ensuring their safety, better integrating different mission components, enforcing zero tolerance of sexual exploitation, expanding the role of women in peacekeeping, and building new strategic communication capabilities such as fighting disinformation. Going forward, peacekeeping operations must develop stronger partnerships in the field, too—in conjunction with non-UN international and regional financial institutions, including the World Bank, as well as other UN agencies, funds, and programs. Some of the primary drivers of conflict, such as the impacts of climate change and the illegal exploitation of natural resources, are now regional and global, requiring peacekeeping missions to work with partners beyond the borders of the countries where they are deployed. These drivers could be addressed through initiatives such as a joint partnership between UN Peacekeeping, the World Bank, and other relevant entities to tackle the illegal exploitation of natural resources in Africa’s Great Lakes region.

The UN Peacekeeping mission currently deployed in Abyei, a small territory disputed by Sudan and South Sudan, offers a powerful example of what such partnerships can do. This mission’s efforts also show why it may be useful for outside observers to moderate their expectations of what peacekeeping can achieve in the current context. In Abyei, the mission is successfully striking local peace agreements among herders and farmers, who compete over increasingly scarce natural resources such as land and water. It has done so by working alongside UN and non-UN partners on the ground to facilitate a series of conferences ahead of cattle migration season, with the aim of preventing conflict and ensuring a peaceful resolution to the disputes that frequently arise in this season. There has been little high-level political progress on the territorial dispute, but the mission has not been a failure. On the contrary, peacekeepers are protecting civilians by preventing conflict between communities and keeping the situation from deteriorating as the civil war in Sudan escalates. If outside observers’ expectations for peacekeeping missions are too grandiose, they can fail to see—and fail to support—these kinds of accomplishments.

Even peacekeeping has its limits. Missions can only operate in line with the three guiding principles of peacekeeping: the parties to a conflict consent to the presence of peacekeepers; the peacekeepers remain impartial; and the peacekeepers do not use force except in self-defense and defense of the mandate. UN Peacekeeping cannot engage in proactive, offensive warfighting operations. But peace can rarely be achieved with armed groups that have no interest in it, and sometimes, stronger so-called enforcement operations are required—operations that can only be carried out by partners outside the UN. The UN must therefore strengthen its partnerships outside the UN, with entities such as the African Union. To be effective, however, these partnerships must be better supported, funded, and prepared, including to ensure their compliance with international humanitarian law. Crises are increasingly diverse; the tools for responding to them should be, too. In 2023, the UN Security Council adopted resolution 2719, which opened the door to directing UN funding to AU peace operations. Such support is critical to enabling the international community to enforce peace, and UN Peacekeeping is currently working with the AU to improve the readiness of AU-led peace operations.

But whatever form a peace operation takes, to be effective in the long run it must be anchored in and contribute to an overarching political solution. The success of any peacekeeping initiative will depend on whether the UN member states prove willing to harness the power of multilateral solutions. The critical importance of the interventions that UN peacekeepers are currently making in places such as the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan must not be underestimated. Preserving a cease-fire is not only essential to protecting civilian life; it also preserves the chance that a future political process will eventually lead to enduring peace.

If UN peacekeepers only have the resources to work toward the immediate goals of preserving cease-fires and protecting civilians, they can only prevent a bad situation from getting worse, not help build a path to peace. And if peacekeepers manage, rather than resolve, conflicts, then large-scale violence can easily return when the troops leave. UN peacekeepers are already bravely saving countless lives for a relatively small investment. But their missions need the attention, political backing, and resources they deserve. There are few better tools for securing peace in a fragile age.