• With blue-helmet deployments shrinking, and facing political and financial headwinds, it may seem that the heyday of multilateral peacekeeping is over. But at UN headquarters in New York, the discussions about the subject are not quite so fatalistic

The coming year will see diplomats and international officials at the UN debate a topic that is almost as old as the world organisation itself: the purpose of its peace operations. Mali’s demand in June 2023 that the Security Council shutter the 15,000-strong blue-helmet stabilisation mission on its territory sent a shock through the UN system, as it demonstrated how politically fragile even a sizeable peace operation could be. In the wake of Mali’s decision, the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) ratcheted up calls for the UN to wind down its decades-old mission in that country. Observers in Turtle Bay and beyond began to speculate that other blue-helmet missions – which employ some 70,000 uniformed and civilian personnel worldwide – might fizzle out sooner rather than later. As an overview in the 2 January edition of The Economist put it, it seems to many that “the era of multilateral peacekeeping draws to an unhappy close”.

At UN headquarters in New York, however, discussions of the future of peace operations are not quite as fatalistic as they were eighteen months ago. The mess in Mali forced UN members not only to acknowledge the weaknesses of such operations, but also to reflect on their residual strengths. Diplomats from many countries have expressed unease about writing off the UN’s peacemaking and peacekeeping roles. In September 2024, member states signed off on The Pact for the Future, a sprawling to-do list of ideas for multilateral cooperation that included a request for Secretary-General António Guterres to “undertake a review of all forms of United Nations peace operations” with a view to mounting “agile, tailored” responses to current and future threats. This proposal easily won assent from the UN membership, in contrast to suggested Pact language on peace and security issues such as nuclear disarmament, which sparked contentious debates.

UN member states and officials now have an opportunity to inject fresh thinking into longstanding debates about the organisation’s deployments.

Another hook for constructive discussions will be a ministerial-level summit on peacekeeping to be hosted by Germany in Berlin in May. This meeting will be the latest in a series on peace operations launched by the Obama administration nearly a decade ago, which have focused on mustering new capabilities for existing blue-helmet missions. German officials have emphasised that the 2025 summit should also involve discussion of the trajectory of peace operations “on a high political level”. UN member states and officials now have an opportunity to inject fresh thinking into longstanding debates about the organisation’s deployments.

A Time to Mend, Not End

It is not surprising that, even as UN field missions appear to be in retreat, conceptual discussions about their future seem to be on the rise. Much of the best thinking about peace operations in the UN’s history has stemmed from moments of crisis. In the wake of the peacekeeping failures in the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s, then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan commissioned the Brahimi report (named after its lead author, Algerian mediator Lakhdar Brahimi), which laid out a blueprint for a new wave of missions in Africa in the early 2000s. After one of those missions, in South Sudan, was blindsided by a surge of violence in 2013, Annan’s successor Ban Ki-moon organised a further study – the report of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations. This paper urged the planners and leaders of UN operations to concentrate on finding political solutions to conflict. It remains a point of reference in current debates.

If a history of setbacks has spurred fresh ideas in New York, there are at least two immediate reasons for UN member states to consider updating rather than discarding peace operations as a tool. The first is that while UN missions may be flawed, they can still help tamp down instability in countries that would otherwise face increased violence. Some evidence for this proposition lies in what happens when missions withdraw prematurely. In the last decade, large-scale blue-helmet forces have pulled out of Haiti and Sudan without these countries having achieved a degree of political stability, only to see both relapse into conflict. (It is of course also arguable that this history shows that the peace operations themselves did not do their job well enough before departure – and questionable whether keeping them in place would have deterred further crisis.) Mali, too, has seen an increase in insurgent attacks since the UN mission’s departure. In the DRC, where the UN stabilisation force, known as MONUSCO, is conducting a phased withdrawal from the east, violence has spiked in South Kivu province since peacekeepers stopped operating there in June 2024. The Congolese government, having previously called for MONUSCO to close by late 2024, has since eased its demands for blue helmets to leave the country altogether.

A … reason not to give up on UN missions is the difficulty of sustaining credible alternatives.

A second reason not to give up on UN missions is the difficulty of sustaining credible alternatives. One particular case – Haiti – has reminded the Security Council of this challenge over the last year. In 2023, the Council mandated a Kenyan-led police operation, not led by the UN, to help the Haitian authorities deal with rising gang violence. Diplomats and commentators including Crisis Group framed this approach to restoring order as innovative and preferable to deploying the sort of large-scale blue-helmet force that the Security Council has dispatched to Haiti after previous bouts of instability. Yet the Kenyan-led mission, which arrived only in mid-2024, has proven too small to make an impact. It has also struggled with basic issues – logistics, administration and, above all, financing – that a UN deployment could have managed using established templates. By the end of 2024, the Haitian authorities and the Biden administration, originally the main cheerleaders for the non-UN force, were lobbying the Security Council and Secretariat to quickly transform it into a blue-helmet operation.

Deploying non-UN-led peace operations elsewhere has proven similarly divisive. The Congolese government has invited in a variety of African forces to deal with militias in the eastern DRC, as alternatives to MONUSCO, but none has been very effective. Over the last year, members of the African Union have also militated for the UN to provide funding for AU-led missions on the continent, building upon a December 2023 Security Council resolution (again supported by the Biden administration) that agreed in principle to a cost-sharing approach in which the UN would finance up to 75 per cent of AU-mandated missions on a case-by-case basis. Yet while various countries floated possible test cases for the new mechanism (including Washington’s suggestion for an AU protection force in Sudan), UN and AU member states could not agree on whether to deploy such missions, let alone work through the financial details involved. In late December, the Security Council passed a resolution holding out the prospect of UN funding for the new AU operation in Somalia – the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia – starting in mid-2025. But leading Republican members of the U.S. Congress are dismissive of using this arrangement in Somalia, and the incoming Trump administration may refuse to sign off on a further Council resolution in the spring that would greenlight this financing model.

As they consider the future of UN peace operations, UN members should bear in mind that – looking beyond Somalia – the new Trump administration is almost certain to ask hard questions about their value. In his first term, Trump and the U.S. permanent representative to the UN, Nikki Haley, made cutting the UN peacekeeping budget a priority. Secretary-General Guterres managed to handle this challenge deftly, dressing up pre-planned cost savings as concessions to the U.S., and the budget has shrunk from approximately $7 billion in 2017 to $6 billion today. Nonetheless, the president and his nominee to be the new U.S. permanent representative, Elise Stefanik, are likely to push for trimming even more. Other UN members thus will have an incentive both to reiterate the effectiveness of UN missions and to look for ways to limit their budgets.

A Window for Innovation

This combination of factors creates a motive for international officials to talk up innovations that will offer greater savings and better results. The UN Department of Peace Operations (DPO) has already circulated a paper outlining a “modular” approach to future operations, with an emphasis on designing missions to take on specific tasks, ranging from safeguarding individual cities to providing security during public health crises. The DPO document is an attempt to underline that UN operations can come in all shapes and sizes, in contrast to the large multidimensional missions with complex state-building mandates that the organisation sent to Africa in the 2000s and 2010s. The paper, which includes 30 different mission models, provides a solid starting point for thinking creatively about what “agile, tailored” UN operations could look like. Ideally, it will inspire both UN members and the organisation’s planners to lay out new approaches to specific cases such as Haiti or Sudan, rather than simply recycling previous templates.

The debate will expand further. The Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, which manages the UN’s largely civilian Special Political Missions – such as those in Afghanistan and Yemen – will likely want to join in the back-and-forth about mission models. In recent years, political missions have taken on tasks, such as ceasefire monitoring in Colombia, that are more traditionally associated with peacekeepers. If the UN is really shifting toward more flexible approaches to crisis management, it will be necessary to design operations that blend attributes and capabilities of both peacekeeping and political missions, though budgetary and bureaucratic obstacles often get in the way. 

May’s peacekeeping conference in Berlin will not be the only opportunity to discuss the trajectory of peace operations. Member states will conduct a review of the UN’s Peacebuilding Architecture throughout 2025, which will be a chance to talk about how UN field operations fit with some of the organisation’s tools for conflict prevention and development assistance. 

At a time in which the Security Council is increasingly divided for geopolitical reasons … getting agreement on new UN deployments will be tough.

In sum, the conditions are set – and much material is already prepared – for a useful discussion about where peace operations are heading. There is of course no guarantee that the UN will authorise many, or any, new operations in the immediate future. At a time in which the Security Council is increasingly divided for geopolitical reasons far removed from the technicalities of peace operations, getting agreement on new UN deployments will be tough. Russia supported Mali’s decision to push out UN peacekeepers, in part to gain more influence in the Sahel. China has objected to the Biden administration’s call for a blue-helmet mission in Haiti. While Beijing has raised reasonable questions about whether such a mission could succeed, diplomats suspect that its stance is also tied to the fact that Haiti has recognised Taiwan. The previous Trump administration was willing to threaten casting its veto to force economy on peace operations. Similar major-power gamesmanship may complicate future Council negotiations.

Nonetheless, New York-based diplomats point out that in a period when the number of conflicts around the globe is rising, new needs for new UN missions may come up unexpectedly. There is a prudential case for the UN Secretariat and member states to encourage debate about the range of responses at the organisation’s disposal – even if the best-laid plans of UN officials tend to be ripped up and rewritten when a real crisis demands that they turn concepts into action.

@International Crisis Group (ICG)