UN Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding

Peacekeeping is the United Nations’ best-known activity and its least authorised one. The Charter never mentions it. Improvised in 1948, formalised in 1956, it has since been stretched across seventy-odd operations and every kind of conflict the drafters did not anticipate. What follows is how that improvisation acquired principles, why the principles keep breaking, and where the enterprise stands in a year when the money has run short and the mandates have stopped coming.

The gap in the Charter that peacekeeping was invented to fill

• The Charter’s design for peace was collective enforcement, not peacekeeping: Chapter VII empowered the Council to determine a threat to the peace and authorise coercive measures.
• Article 43 was to supply the means — special agreements placing national forces at the Council’s disposal, coordinated by a Military Staff Committee of the P5’s chiefs of staff.
• Article 43 was never implemented, not once. Talks in the Military Staff Committee collapsed in 1947 over the force’s size, composition and basing, and the Cold War closed the question. The Council was left with a mandate to keep the peace and no army to keep it with.
• Peacekeeping filled that vacuum. Dag Hammarskjöld called it “Chapter Six and a Half” — more than Chapter VI’s pacific settlement, less than Chapter VII’s enforcement, authorised by neither.
• Its legal basis lies in the implied powers of the Council and Assembly, confirmed for financing purposes by the International Court in 1962. The missing textual anchor is why every principle of peacekeeping is doctrine, not law, and why the doctrine has been rewritten roughly once a decade since.

Peacekeeping exists because the Charter’s own security machinery was never built; it is a workaround that outlived the emergency it was invented for.

Definition, and the boundary against its neighbours

• A working definition: the deployment of international personnel, with the consent of the parties, to help implement or stabilise an agreement to stop fighting — interposed between belligerents and creating political space for a settlement.

	Pacific settlement (Ch. VI)	Peacekeeping	Enforcement (Ch. VII)
Consent	Parties choose the method	Constitutive — withdraw it and the mission leaves	Not required
Force	None	Self-defence and defence of the mandate	All necessary means
Command	Mediators, commissions	UN command via the Secretary-General	Coalition or regional body
Financing	Regular budget	Separate assessed scale, P5 premium	The authorised states
Purpose	Settle the dispute	Hold the line while politics works	Coerce or reverse aggression

• Collective security’s theory, Chapter VII article by article, Korea, the Gulf War, Uniting for Peace and the responsibility to protect are treated separately. One boundary point is enough here: enforcement is action against a party, peacekeeping action with the parties’ agreement — a distinction that dissolves the moment a mission is authorised to fight one of them. Chapter VIII, on regional arrangements, is where the action is now moving, and is taken up below.

Origins: observers, Suez and the classical model

• UNTSO (1948), the Truce Supervision Organization, was the first UN field operation — unarmed observers monitoring the truce in Palestine after the first Arab–Israeli war. UNMOGIP (1949) followed, observing the ceasefire line in Kashmir after the Karachi Agreement.
• Both are still deployed, financed from the regular budget rather than the peacekeeping scale — an accident of age that makes them the system’s cheapest missions.
  • Their longevity is itself an argument. A mission that watches a line for three generations has stabilised a conflict without settling it — a dispute frozen where the fighting stopped, with the pressure to settle removed.

UNEF I and the invention of armed peacekeeping

• The Suez crisis of 1956 produced the first armed force. Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt after Nasser nationalised the canal, and Britain and France vetoed action in the Council. The matter passed to an emergency special session of the Assembly under Uniting for Peace, and it was the Assembly, not the Council, that created UNEF I.
• Lester Pearson, Canada’s Secretary of State for External Affairs, proposed an international contingent to separate the combatants and cover the invaders’ withdrawal, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957.
• Hammarskjöld designed the force in days and codified it in the Summary Study of 1958, peacekeeping’s founding doctrinal text, whose rules survive almost unchanged.
  • The force enters and remains only with host-state consent.
  • It does not control the territory it occupies and must not shift the balance between the parties.
  • Its personnel come from states other than the permanent members, to insulate it from great-power rivalry.
  • It uses force only in self-defence.

The three classical principles, and what each costs

• Consent of the parties. The mission deploys because the host state and the belligerents want it there; consent is what separates peacekeeping from intervention.
  • Consent can be withdrawn. In May 1967 Nasser demanded UNEF’s removal; U Thant found no legal basis to refuse and the force left. The Six-Day War began on 5 June 1967, weeks later.
  • The episode fixed the standing objection in permanent form: a force dismissible by the party most likely to break the peace is available exactly until it is needed. Chapter VII mandates and status-of-forces agreements raise the cost of expulsion today but have not changed the underlying law.
• Impartiality, which is not neutrality — the most consequential confusion in the field.
  • Neutrality means treating the parties alike and taking no position on their conduct. Impartiality means applying the mandate and Charter even-handedly, which requires acting against whichever party violates them.
  • A neutral force facing a party massacring civilians does nothing, because acting would be taking sides; an impartial force acts against that party precisely because impartiality is loyalty to a standard, not to the parties.
• Non-use of force except in self-defence — and in defence of the mandate.
  • The original rule was self-defence alone. The added clause, present from ONUC and settled by the 1990s, has swallowed the rule: if the mandate includes protecting civilians, force used to protect civilians defends the mandate.
  • The third principle now restrains very little. What restrains force in practice is capability, national caveats and political will, not doctrine.

ONUC in the Congo: the exception that broke every rule at the start

• ONUC (1960–64) deployed weeks after Congolese independence, at the government’s request, as the army mutinied, Belgium reintroduced troops and mineral-rich Katanga seceded under Moïse Tshombe with Belgian and mercenary backing.
• It broke each principle. Consent fragmented when the inviting government split; impartiality gave way when resolution 161 of 21 February 1961 authorised force to prevent civil war; and non-use of force collapsed into operations that reintegrated Katanga in January 1963.
• Roughly 250 UN personnel died, the heaviest toll of any mission until this century, and ONUC became the model of what peacekeepers were thereafter told not to do.
• Hammarskjöld paid politically and then personally. The Soviet Union demanded that the office of Secretary-General be replaced by a “troika” of three officials representing West, East and non-aligned — a veto inside the Secretariat. He died in an air crash near Ndola on 18 September 1961, flying to meet Tshombe.

“The United Nations was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.” — Dag Hammarskjöld

The financing crisis and Certain Expenses

• The Soviet Union and France refused to pay their ONUC and UNEF assessments, arguing that the Assembly could not create or fund enforcement-like operations and that only the Council could bind members to such costs.
• In Certain Expenses of the United Nations, advisory opinion of 20 July 1962, the Court held by nine votes to five that these were “expenses of the Organization” under Article 17(2).
  • The phrase covers all expenditure in pursuit of the Charter’s purposes, and an internal procedural irregularity would not by itself strip such costs of that character.
• The opinion won the law and lost the politics. The defaulters still refused to pay, the Article 19 sanction was never applied to them, and the 1964–65 Assembly session was conducted almost without votes to avoid the confrontation.
• This is where the modern arrears problem begins. The precedent established that a permanent member may withhold peacekeeping contributions on political grounds without consequence, and every liquidity crisis since has run in the channel ONUC cut.

The generations of peacekeeping, and what each was answering

The generational framework is not a chronology but a sequence of answers to a changing question. Each generation began when the previous model visibly failed, and each carried forward the problems of the one before.

First generation: traditional interposition, 1948–1988

• The typical mission was inter-state, post-ceasefire, lightly armed, monitoring a line between two regular armies that had agreed to stop.
• UNFICYP (1964), UNDOF (1974) and UNIFIL (1978) survive; UNEF II (1973–79) is the model case.
• The UN Peacekeeping Forces received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988, at the moment the model they represented was about to be superseded.

Second generation: multidimensional peacekeeping, 1989–1993

• The end of the Cold War unlocked the Council and produced comprehensive peace agreements in internal conflicts that the parties asked the UN to implement. These missions did not monitor a line; they ran a transition — elections, disarmament and reintegration, human-rights monitoring, refugee return, police reform, and in places civil administration.
  • UNTAG in Namibia (1989–90) supervised the transition to independence and the elections that produced it.
  • ONUSAL in El Salvador (1991–95) verified the agreement ending a twelve-year civil war, with a human-rights mandate that preceded the ceasefire.
  • UNTAC in Cambodia (1992–93) was the most ambitious: the UN took over key functions of government and ran a national election with over 20,000 personnel.
  • ONUMOZ in Mozambique (1992–94) demobilised both armies and delivered an election the losing side accepted.
• The durable successes of UN peacekeeping are concentrated here, and the reason is visible: in each case a negotiated settlement existed that the parties wanted implemented, and the UN was implementing rather than imposing it.

The crisis of the mid-1990s

• Success produced overreach: missions were deployed into wars that had not ended, on mandates written for wars that had.
• UNOSOM II in Somalia (1993–95) received a Chapter VII mandate for disarmament and state-building in a collapsed country with no agreement to implement. Pursuit of the faction leader Mohamed Farah Aideed made the mission a belligerent, and the deaths of Pakistani peacekeepers in June 1993 and of American soldiers in Mogadishu in October 1993 ended Western willingness to risk casualties in African peacekeeping for a decade.
• UNPROFOR escorted humanitarian convoys in a live war and was given “safe areas” to protect without the troops, air support or mandate to defend them. Srebrenica fell on 11 July 1995 and roughly 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered inside a UN-declared safe area, in the presence of a Dutch battalion.
• UNAMIR in Rwanda was a small traditional force under Roméo Dallaire when the genocide began in April 1994. His cable of 11 January 1994 warned of arms caches and a plan to exterminate Tutsi, and was answered with an instruction to inform a government several of whose members were organising the killing. The Council then cut the force to a few hundred while 800,000 people were killed in a hundred days.
• The two commissioned inquiries of 1999 are the most honest documents the organisation has produced about itself.
  • The Independent Inquiry into UN action during the Rwandan genocide, chaired by Ingvar Carlsson, reported in December 1999 that the failure was systemic — an inadequate mandate, a refusal to say genocide, absent political will, and a Secretariat that did not press the Council.
  • The Fall of Srebrenica, the Secretary-General’s report of November 1999, found that the safe-area policy had substituted a declaration for a defence, and that impartiality had been misapplied where one party was committing mass murder.

“The cardinal lesson of Srebrenica is that a deliberate and systematic attempt to terrorize, expel or murder an entire people must be met decisively with all necessary means, and with the political will to carry the policy through to its logical conclusion.” — Report of the Secretary-General on the fall of Srebrenica

• Both inquiries reached the conclusion that is the doctrinal turning point of the subject: neutrality between a perpetrator and a victim is not impartiality but complicity. Everything in the reform chain after 2000 follows from it.

Third generation: robust peacekeeping and the protection of civilians

• Robust peacekeeping describes a mission that stays peacekeeping in character — consent-based, impartial, UN-commanded — while carrying Chapter VII authority to use tactical force to defend itself, its mandate and civilians.
• UNAMSIL in Sierra Leone made the argument. Created by resolution 1270 of 22 October 1999, it was overrun in May 2000 when the Revolutionary United Front took some 500 peacekeepers hostage. A British intervention, Operation Palliser, stabilised Freetown, after which the reinforced mission completed disarmament and delivered elections.
  • The lesson remains ambiguous: robust peacekeeping worked, but it worked because a capable national force did the fighting first.
• Resolution 1270 carried the first explicit protection-of-civilians mandate, authorising action to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence — “within its capabilities and areas of deployment”.
  • That qualifier has done enormous work since. Protection is now mandated in most operations and is the task by which host populations judge them.
  • The gap between mandate and capability is the standing scandal of this generation. Fifteen thousand troops cannot protect several million civilians across a territory the size of Western Europe, and promising to does not create the capacity but does create the expectation whose disappointment destroys local legitimacy.

Fourth generation: stabilisation

• Stabilisation missions deploy where there is no peace agreement and the host government is one party among several, to help it extend authority against armed opponents — often transnational jihadist groups.
• MONUSCO crossed the doctrinal line. Resolution 2098 of 28 March 2013 created the Force Intervention Brigade, some 3,000 strong, mandated to conduct targeted offensive operations to neutralise armed groups — the first UN force with an explicit offensive mandate.
  • The resolution insisted this was “on an exceptional basis and without creating a precedent”. The brigade succeeded against M23 in 2013 and has not repeated that success.
• MINUSMA in Mali (2013–23) became the deadliest mission in UN history, with over 300 fatalities, operating alongside French counter-terrorism forces against groups with which no political process existed; MINUSCA carries a protection mandate in a country where the government’s own security partners are among the principal abusers.
• The doctrinal objection is that stabilisation destroys consent and impartiality together. A mission fighting alongside the government against its enemies is a party to the conflict: it forfeits impartiality by definition, converts its personnel into legitimate targets, and makes its consent hostage to a government it cannot criticise.
• The counter is that the alternative is not classical peacekeeping but none at all: a doctrine usable only in the conflicts of 1956 is one for a vanished world.

Generation	Conflict type	Core task	Representative missions	Problem bequeathed
First (1948–88)	Inter-state, post-ceasefire	Monitor a line	UNTSO, UNMOGIP, UNEF I, UNFICYP	Consent is revocable; conflicts freeze
Second (1989–93)	Intra-state, post-agreement	Implement a settlement	UNTAG, ONUSAL, UNTAC, ONUMOZ	Needs an agreement parties want
Crisis (1993–99)	Live internal war	Access, safe areas	UNOSOM II, UNPROFOR, UNAMIR	Neutrality in the face of atrocity
Third (1999–2013)	Post-conflict with spoilers	Protect civilians	UNAMSIL, UNMIL, UNOCI, UNMISS	Protection promised beyond capacity
Fourth (2013– )	No peace to keep	Extend state authority	MONUSCO, MINUSMA, MINUSCA	Mission becomes a party

The doctrinal reform chain, 1992 to 2026

Peacekeeping has no legislature. Its doctrine is made by commissioned reports that diagnose the last disaster and prescribe against its repetition, and reading them in order shows what the organisation has learned and what it has merely restated.

An Agenda for Peace, 1992, and its Supplement

• Boutros Boutros-Ghali’sAn Agenda for Peace, June 1992, is the founding text of the post-Cold War expansion and still supplies the standard classification.
  • Preventive diplomacy — keeping disputes from becoming conflicts: fact-finding, early warning, confidence-building, preventive deployment.
  • Peacemaking — bringing hostile parties to agreement, essentially the Chapter VI toolkit.
  • Peacekeeping — field deployment, “hitherto with the consent of all the parties concerned” — a qualification that signalled what was coming.
  • Post-conflict peacebuilding — supporting the structures that consolidate peace and prevent relapse. The term enters UN vocabulary here.
• Its most radical proposal was for peace-enforcement units: heavily armed on-call formations under Council authority for ceasefires agreed but not holding. None was built.
• The Supplement of January 1995 walked much of it back. Written after Somalia and during Bosnia, it warned that the UN had taken on tasks beyond its capacity, that peacekeeping and enforcement must stay distinct, and that the organisation should not become a combatant in conflicts it was sent to calm. The reversal in three years, by the same author, measures the gap between what the Council mandates and what the Secretariat can deliver.

The Brahimi Report, 2000

• The Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, chaired by Lakhdar Brahimi and issued in August 2000, was commissioned after Rwanda and Srebrenica and remains the field’s most influential document. Its arguments matter more than its recommendations.
  • Mandates must be clear, credible and achievable. The Council should not authorise what cannot be done, nor treat a mandate as a substitute for the means to execute it.
  • The Secretariat must tell the Council what it needs to hear, not what it wants to hear. Institutional deference — accepting an under-resourced mandate rather than contesting it — was named as a cause of failure.
  • Impartiality means adherence to Charter principles, not equal treatment of parties. Local parties are sometimes not moral equals, and treating them as such is a failure of the mandate.
  • Peacekeepers must be able to defend themselves, the mission and the mandate, with robust rules of engagement against those who use violence to undermine an agreement.
  • Rapid deployment: a traditional mission fully deployed within 30 days of the enabling resolution and a complex one within 90 days, supported by on-call lists of about a hundred military officers and a hundred police and justice experts at seven days’ notice, and a strengthened Secretariat with a strategic-analysis capacity.
• Implemented: an enlarged Secretariat, later split into departments for operations and field support; strategic reserves, a standing police capacity and integrated planning; and Council endorsement of clear, credible and achievable mandates in resolution 1327 of 13 November 2000.
• Not implemented: the timelines were never met, the on-call lists were diluted, the strategic-analysis unit was blocked by members suspicious of a UN intelligence capability, and the Council has gone on writing mandates unmatched to resources — the recommendation the report cared about most.

The Capstone Doctrine and the Kigali Principles

• The Capstone Doctrine of 2008 — United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Principles and Guidelines — is the first consolidated statement of doctrine the organisation ever produced.
  • It restated the three principles in modern form, held that consent at the strategic level may coexist with tactical resistance, and drew the line between robust peacekeeping (tactical force with strategic consent) and peace enforcement (force against a party without its consent).
• The Kigali Principles on the Protection of Civilians (2015) — eighteen non-binding pledges adopted at a conference in Rwanda — go further than any UN text on the willingness to use force.
  • Signatories undertake to be prepared to use force to protect civilians, to avoid caveats restricting their contingents, and to hold their own commanders accountable for failure to protect.
  • Around fifty states have endorsed them, mostly African and European contributors. Most of the largest troop contributors, including India, have not, on the argument that they commit soldiers to a use of force members have neither agreed nor resourced.

HIPPO, 2015 — the primacy of politics

• The High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations, chaired by José Ramos-Horta, reported in June 2015 as Uniting Our Strengths for Peace: Politics, Partnership and People, proposing four essential shifts.
  • The primacy of politics. Lasting peace comes from political settlements, not military or technical engagement; a peace operation serves a political strategy and is worthless without one. This is the panel’s central claim and the one every later document repeats.
  • Responsive operations. The UN should think in terms of a spectrum of peace operations — good offices, political missions, observers, multidimensional operations — tailored to context rather than picked from a menu.
  • Stronger partnerships, above all a global–regional architecture with the African Union, including predictable financing for AU-led operations.
  • A field-focused, people-centred Secretariat, in which headquarters serves missions and missions serve affected populations.
• HIPPO also drew a line the Council has since crossed repeatedly: UN peacekeeping is not suited to counter-terrorism or military enforcement, and where these are needed they should be done by others under Council authorisation.

The Cruz Report, 2017

• Lieutenant General (retired) Carlos Alberto dos Santos Cruz, a former force commander in the Congo and Haiti, was asked to report on the rising death toll. Improving Security of United Nations Peacekeepers appeared in December 2017.
• 195 peacekeepers were killed by acts of violence between 2013 and 2017, more than in any comparable earlier period, and 2017 was the deadliest year since 1994.
• The diagnosis was cultural: missions suffered from a “Chapter VI syndrome” — a defensive, casualty-averse, static posture that invited attack — and from contingents unwilling or unequipped to act.

“The blue helmet and the United Nations flag no longer offer natural protection.” — Improving Security of United Nations Peacekeepers

• Its recommendations ran along four axes: change the mindset, acquire the capabilities to act, adapt the footprint to the threat, and build accountability for failures of protection and performance.
• The contested recommendation is that missions must be ready to use force pre-emptively and to accept casualties — that peacekeepers die from inaction more often than from action. Critics answered that the report was militaristic, treated a political problem as a security one, and that accepting casualties is a policy no contributor’s parliament has agreed; it also sidestepped whether the UN should deploy into such environments at all.

Action for Peacekeeping and after

• Action for Peacekeeping (A4P), launched by António Guterres in 2018, replaced commissioned diagnosis with a political compact. Its Declaration of Shared Commitments, endorsed by over 150 states, covered politics, women and peace and security, protection, safety, performance and accountability, peacebuilding, partnerships and conduct.
• A4P+ (2021) narrowed this to seven priorities: coherence behind a political strategy; operational integration; capabilities and mindsets; accountability to peacekeepers; accountability of peacekeepers; strategic communications against mis- and disinformation; and cooperation with host countries.
• A New Agenda for Peace (July 2023) declared that the post-Cold War period is over and that the classical model no longer fits most deployments. It called for nimbler models with clear exit strategies, Council willingness to authorise multinational or regional forces where a UN mission is inappropriate, and assessed financing of African Union operations.
• The comprehensive review of peace operations, requested by the Pact for the Future, reached the Assembly and Council in 2026 as A/80/798–S/2026/600.
  • It sets out fourteen strategic priorities for a “reset for a new geopolitical era”: peacemaking and prevention first; partnership with host states; focused mandates matched to resources; a division of labour with the rest of the UN system; cost efficiency; and technology-enabled operations against drones, explosive devices, cyber-attack and information threats.
  • Its argued shifts are from static to agile, from broad mandates to focused tasks, from isolation to networks, and from reaction to prevention.
  • The criticism is that it is incremental rather than transformative, preserves the departmental split between peacekeeping and political missions that HIPPO wanted abolished, and treats host governments as partners while saying little about the communities missions protect.

Review	Diagnosis	Prescription	What changed
Agenda for Peace, 1992	Under-equipped for the post-Cold War surge	Typology; peace-enforcement units	Typology stuck; units never created
Brahimi, 2000	Mandates unmatched to means	Clear, credible, achievable; 30/90 days	Secretariat grew; timelines never met
Kigali, 2015	Contingents refuse to protect	Eighteen pledges to use force to protect	~50 endorsers; large contributors abstained
HIPPO, 2015	Peacekeeping substituting for politics	Primacy of politics; spectrum; AU partnership	Language universal; practice unchanged
Cruz, 2017	Passive posture invites attack	Change mindset; accept casualties	Training and casualty-evacuation reform
A4P / A4P+	Diagnosis without commitment	Shared commitments; seven priorities	Performance and communications capacity
2026 review	Fiscal collapse, political disinterest	Fourteen priorities; agile, focused, networked	Pending; the budget is deciding first

Women, peace and security

• Security Council resolution 1325 of 31 October 2000 was the first time the Council treated women’s experience of armed conflict as a matter of international peace and security rather than a social or humanitarian question. It is the foundation of what is now a body of ten resolutions, a reporting architecture and a national-planning industry.
• It did not arrive from nowhere.
  • The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995) made women and armed conflict one of its twelve critical areas of concern, giving the campaign a negotiated text to build on.
  • The Windhoek Declaration and Namibia Plan of Action on mainstreaming a gender perspective in peace support operations, adopted in May 2000, drew on the experience of UNTAG in Namibia and supplied the operational content.
  • Namibia held the Council presidency in October 2000 and drove the resolution through against initial incredulity. The NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, formed that year, supplied the drafting, the lobbying and the civil-society briefers who address the Council at every annual debate.

The four pillars

• Participation — women’s equal involvement in conflict prevention and resolution, in negotiations, in post-conflict governance and in peace operations at every level, including as envoys.
• Protection — protection from gender-based violence, particularly rape, in conflict and in camps for the displaced, and respect for women’s rights in constitutions, policing, elections and the courts.
• Prevention — prevention of conflict and of violence against women within it, including prosecution of those responsible and exclusion of sexual-violence crimes from amnesties.
• Relief and recovery — attention to the needs of women and girls in repatriation, rehabilitation and reconstruction, including camp design and demobilisation programmes.

The follow-up resolutions as a body of law

Resolution	Year	What it added
1325	2000	The foundational text; the four pillars; participation as a security question
1820	2008	Sexual violence as a tactic of war, and so a security question, not merely a crime; excluded from amnesties
1888	2009	Creates the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict and a team of experts on rule of law
1889	2009	Focus on participation and post-conflict recovery; mandates indicators to measure implementation
1960	2010	Monitoring and reporting arrangements; annual listing of parties suspected of patterns of sexual violence
2106	2013	Operational detail on accountability; women’s political and economic empowerment as prevention
2122	2013	Strengthens participation and access to justice; names the implementation gap
2242	2015	Integrates the agenda into counter-terrorism; creates the Informal Expert Group
2467	2019	Survivor-centred approach to conflict-related sexual violence; adopted 13–0, China and Russia abstaining
2493	2019	Full implementation of prior resolutions; protects women peacebuilders and human-rights defenders

• Resolution 2467 is where the agenda’s political limits became visible. References to sexual and reproductive health services for survivors were cut from the draft to avert a veto, as were references to the International Criminal Court, and a proposed working group on sexual violence was dropped at Chinese and Russian insistence. That a resolution written for survivors could be stripped of its provisions for them measures how contested the agenda has become.

Implementation: the record in figures

• National Action Plans are the principal implementation instrument, each state setting out how it will apply the agenda at home and in its deployments. 113 countries had adopted one by mid-2025, but only about a quarter came with a budget — a plan without financing is a statement of intent.
• Women in uniformed peacekeeping have risen from about 1% in 1993 to roughly 8% of military contingents, with 23% of military experts and staff officers, 17% of formed police units, 31% of individual police and 40% of justice and corrections personnel.
  • The Uniformed Gender Parity Strategy 2018–2028 targets 15% of military contingents, 25% of observers and staff officers and 30% of both police categories by 2028. Every category except contingents is at or near target; contingents, the bulk of deployed strength, are not.
  • The constraint lies in the contributing states, not the UN: women are a small share of the combat arms of most contributing militaries, and a mission cannot deploy women who are not in the units offered.
• The Elsie Initiative, launched by Canada in 2017, and its Fund hosted by UN Women since 2019, attack that constraint directly — funding barrier assessments under the MOWIP methodology and policy change inside contributing militaries.
• Participation in peace processes remains the weakest pillar. In 2024 women were about 7% of negotiators and 14% of mediators in formal processes and 20% of signatories — falling to 7% if Colombia is excluded; in UN-led processes, 18% of negotiators.
• Conflict-related sexual violence documented by the UN exceeded 4,600 cases in 2024, roughly 87% above 2022 — reflecting both worsening conflict and better monitoring, and under control by nobody’s account.

Twenty-five years of resolutions have produced a near-universal vocabulary, a measurable gain in uniformed representation, and almost no movement at the negotiating table.

Why it matters operationally, not only normatively

• Access. A patrol without women cannot speak to half the population in many societies; female engagement teams and mixed police units reach households, markets and camps male soldiers cannot enter.
• Information. Access converts into early warning: reports of troop movements, forced recruitment, mined roads and sexual violence reach missions through women who will speak only to women.
• Conduct. Missions with more women report fewer allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse and are more readily approached by victims.
• Durability. Much-cited research associates women’s participation with agreements more likely to be reached and to last.
  • The honest caveat is that the causal claim is contested. Processes including women tend to be more inclusive, better supported internationally and less dominated by armed actors, so the correlation may report the character of the process rather than the effect of participation. The case for participation as a right does not depend on the effectiveness claim, and resting it there is a strategic error.

The critique

• “Add women and stir.” Counting women into existing structures without changing what those structures do satisfies the metric and leaves the politics untouched; representation becomes a target to report rather than a redistribution of authority.
• Instrumentalisation. Justifying inclusion by mission effectiveness makes participation contingent on usefulness rather than grounded in equal entitlement, and licenses its withdrawal when it stops being useful.
• Securitisation of gender. Feminist critics argue the agenda has been captured by the security establishment: equality is now discussed in the register of threat and stability, and the transformative claims of the movement that produced 1325 have been absorbed into military planning.
• The protection pillar has eaten the participation pillar. Resources, reporting and Council attention concentrate on women as victims to be protected rather than agents to be included — reproducing the framing 1325 was written to displace.
• The current backlash is the sharpest since the agenda began. The share of Council resolutions referencing women’s rights has fallen substantially since 2020; a convergence between the United States under its present administration and Russia has produced systematic deletion of gender language from Council products — the 2025 UNIFIL resolution contains none — and gender and human-rights posts were among the first casualties of the 2025–26 funding cuts, with women’s safe spaces closed in Yemen and Syria.

India’s contribution here

• India deployed the first all-women formed police unit in UN history to Liberia in 2007, credited with raising local women’s recruitment into the Liberian police, and a women’s platoon to Abyei in January 2023, with female engagement teams in Lebanon and the Congo.
• Major Radhika Sen, serving with MONUSCO, received the Military Gender Advocate of the Year award for 2023, the second Indian officer so recognised.

Sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers

• Abuse of the people a mission was sent to protect is peacekeeping’s deepest institutional failure — not a failure of capability or mandate but of the organisation’s own conduct, and the structure that produces impunity is one member states designed and defend.
• The pattern was documented mission by mission: trafficking and forced prostitution around the Bosnia missions; exploitation of women and girls for food and money in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, exposed in 2004; abuse of children in the Central African Republic in 2013–14, including by French Sangaris troops operating under Council authorisation but outside UN command; and a long-running abuse ring around the Haiti mission.
• The Central African Republic case produced the sharpest judgement: an independent review panel chaired by Marie Deschamps found in 2015 that the UN’s response had been “fragmented and bureaucratic” and that abuse by peacekeepers had been treated as a disciplinary matter rather than a gross violation of human rights.
• The Zeid Report of March 2005, by Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, remains the framework document: uniform standards binding on all categories of personnel, investigative capacity independent of the mission, on-site courts martial by troop contributors, financial liability for peacekeepers who father and abandon children, and command accountability for managers who fail to prevent or report.
• The zero-tolerance policy prohibits sexual activity with anyone under eighteen and any exchange of money or goods for sex.

The UN can repatriate a contingent and it can publish a name; it cannot prosecute a soldier, and everyone involved knows it.

• The structural reason accountability fails is jurisdictional. Under the model status-of-forces agreement and the memoranda with contributors, members of national military contingents remain subject to the exclusive criminal jurisdiction of their sending state.
  • The UN may investigate, repatriate an individual and bar a unit or country from future deployment; it cannot charge, try or punish. Prosecution depends wholly on the contributing state, and most do not prosecute. Civilian staff and experts on mission are differently placed — immunity may be waived — but most allegations concern uniformed personnel.
• Reform has been real but partial. Since 2016 the UN publishes the nationality of contingents against which allegations are made; the Trust Fund in Support of Victims of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse was created the same year, with India its first contributor; and a Victims’ Rights Advocate was appointed in 2017, with assistance separated from the outcome of criminal proceedings.
• The numbers are uncomfortable. Allegations again exceeded a hundred in 2024, with the Congo and the Central African Republic accounting for over four-fifths, and roughly 750 paternity and child-support claims filed since 2006, more than 500 unresolved.
  • Whether the underlying conduct has fallen cannot be established: reporting, outreach and record-keeping have all improved, so a steady count is consistent with either a steady problem better recorded or a worsening one. What can be established is that referrals to contributing states rarely produce prosecutions — a fact about member states, not the Secretariat.

Financing: who decides against who serves

• Peacekeeping is financed by a separate assessed scale, steeper than the regular budget. Members are banded by per-capita income, the poorest receive large discounts, and the permanent members pay a premium on the principle that special responsibility carries a special share of the cost.
  • The United States is assessed at roughly 27% of peacekeeping against a 22% ceiling in the regular budget; China at about 19%; then Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France. UNTSO and UNMOGIP are the exceptions, funded from the regular budget because they predate the scale.
• The budget year runs from 1 July to 30 June. It was US$5.4 billion for 2025–26, and the Assembly approved US$5.1 billion for 2026–27 — nearly half a billion dollars less, alongside a 21.6% reduction for special political missions.
• Troop contributors are reimbursed at a standard rate of US$1,428 per soldier per month, with separate reimbursement for contingent-owned equipment.
  • Reimbursement is chronically delayed, because the UN cannot pay out money it has not been paid, and the delay transfers the cost onto the contributor, which goes on feeding, equipping and paying a deployed battalion while it waits.
  • The states that wait are among the poorest members. Delayed reimbursement is in effect an interest-free loan from low-income contributors to the states in arrears — the least discussed inequity in the system.

	Who writes the mandate	Who pays	Who serves
Actors	The Security Council, decisively the P5	The largest economies, P5 at a premium	South Asian and African states
Effect	Mandates written by states that will not deploy	Leverage over scope and duration	Casualties fall on non-deciding states

• The two groups barely overlap. The permanent members supply a small fraction of deployed personnel, while the largest contributors — Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Rwanda, Pakistan, Ghana, Indonesia, Egypt — sit outside the body that decides where their soldiers go.
• Article 44 requires the Council, when it decides to use force, to invite a member not represented on it to participate in decisions concerning the employment of that member’s contingents. It has never been operated as a right, and contributors treat its neglect as the original grievance.
• The Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations, the C-34, created by the Assembly in 1965 and now over 150 members, is the formal forum in which contributors shape policy. It works by consensus, which makes it inclusive and slow, and in several sessions it has failed to agree substantive text.
• Triangular consultations among Council, Secretariat and contributors were institutionalised after Brahimi. Contributors argue these are briefings, not negotiations, convened after the strategic choices are made; the demand is not for a veto but for participation in framing, and it has never been conceded.

The austerity of 2025–26

• In 2025 peace operations were ordered to cut 15% of expenditure and repatriate about 25% of uniformed personnel, with reductions across the Congo, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Lebanon and the Golan.
• This was a cash-flow measure, not a strategic decision. No review concluded that these missions needed a quarter fewer soldiers; the organisation ran out of money because assessed contributions went unpaid, and the arrears are concentrated in one member.
• It is the sharpest illustration of structural dependence: the number of peacekeepers protecting civilians in eastern Congo is now set, in practice, by the payment behaviour of a single government.

The case for a permanent United Nations force

• The Charter’s own answer was Article 43 and the Military Staff Committee. Negotiations foundered in 1947 on size, composition, basing and command, each side unwilling to accept an arrangement the other could dominate. The Committee still formally exists and does nothing.
• The proposals since form a continuous line.
  • Trygve Lie’s UN Guard Force (1948) — a few thousand permanently recruited personnel for observation and guard duties. Rejected as the germ of a UN army; a much smaller Field Service resulted.
  • Boutros-Ghali’s peace-enforcement units (1992) — on-call national formations, heavily armed and commonly trained, to restore broken ceasefires. Never created.
  • Brian Urquhart’s For a United Nations Volunteer Military Force (1993) is the most discussed. Urquhart, who had served under Hammarskjöld and run peacekeeping for years, argued for individually recruited volunteers serving the UN directly rather than seconded contingents — about five thousand strong, deployable on the Secretary-General’s authority under Council mandate, to act between the emergency and the arrival of a conventional force.
  • SHIRBRIG (1996–2009), formed by Denmark with Austria, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Sweden, fielded up to 4,000–5,000 troops with an advance party deployable in 14 days and the main body in 30. It supplied headquarters staff for the Ethiopia–Eritrea mission and support in Liberia and Sudan, and mentored the African Standby Force. It disbanded on 30 June 2009, its members exhausted by Afghanistan and Iraq and its position never institutionalised inside the Secretariat.
  • The UN Standby Arrangements System and its successor the Peacekeeping Capability Readiness System (2015) are registries of pledged national capabilities at graded readiness, with a Rapid Deployment Level for units committed to move within sixty days. They are a database of promises, not a force, and pledges are withdrawable.
• The case for.
  • Speed, measured against Rwanda. The genocide killed most of its victims in six weeks. No force generated from national pledges could have arrived in that window; the delay was not incidental to the disaster, it was the disaster.
  • Independence from national caveats and from withdrawal. A UN-recruited force takes UN orders, where seconded contingents arrive with restrictions on task, geography and risk that commanders discover only after deployment — and can be repatriated mid-mandate when domestic politics turn.
  • Professionalism. A permanent force trains to one doctrine with uniform rules of engagement, discipline and equipment, instead of assembling units of radically unequal capability under one flag.
• The case against is stronger politically, which is why nothing has been built.
  • Cost. A standing force must be paid and equipped whether deployed or not, and members already in arrears on operations they authorised will not fund an army in barracks.
  • Command and authority. If the Council orders it into action, the force is only as usable as P5 agreement allows and the speed advantage evaporates; if the Secretary-General does, members have handed an unelected official the power to commit force, which no great power will accept.
  • Sovereignty, from both directions. The great powers will not accept a supranational instrument they do not control; the Global South will not either, on the ground that it would be used against weak states in the name of protection and never against strong ones.
  • Recruitment and loyalty. Whom does a UN soldier serve, whose law governs their conduct, who compensates their family, and where do they go when the emergency ends?
  • It would collapse the distinction between peacekeeping and collective security. A standing force under its own command is an instrument of enforcement, and building it would answer the Charter’s unfinished business by abolishing the workaround that substituted for it. Troop contributors including India press this objection, adding that such a force could carry powerful states’ soldiers in the disguise of peacekeepers.
  • The plain fact is that the states with the money and the airlift do not want it and those that want it cannot pay for it — which is why the idea has been discussed for eighty years without result.

Peacekeeping in internal conflicts

• Peacekeeping was designed for wars between states and is now deployed almost entirely inside them, and every element of the classical model assumes conditions internal conflict does not supply.
• Consent from whom? In an internal conflict the state is usually one of the parties and sometimes the principal abuser; in a collapsed state no authority can give meaningful consent at all, and consent granted by a government is worthless in territory it does not control.
• Impartiality against atrocity. Where one side is killing civilians, even-handedness becomes complicity — and acting against that side destroys the appearance of neutrality on which access and safety depend.
• There is often no ceasefire to keep. Classical peacekeeping follows an agreement; contemporary deployments frequently precede one, or accompany a process several armed actors have not joined.
• Multiplying armed actors without command. Militias, criminal networks, jihadist franchises and foreign-backed proxies fragment and re-form. No one’s signature binds their fighters, and an agreement with commanders does not reach the man at the roadblock.
• Consent withdrawn as a political weapon. Host governments have learned that expelling a mission is cheap and popular.
  • Mali’s transitional authorities demanded MINUSMA’s departure in June 2023, and the Council terminated the mandate by resolution 2690 of 30 June 2023, requiring withdrawal within six months from a country in active insurgency.
  • Sudan expelled the political mission UNITAMS in 2023 as war broke out; the Democratic Republic of the Congo obtained an accelerated MONUSCO drawdown after mass protests against the mission’s failure to stop the fighting in the east.
• State-building mandates blur into government. Where the state has collapsed the mission becomes a transitional administration, accountable to the Council rather than the population it governs.
  • UNTAET in Timor-Leste (1999–2002) exercised full legislative, executive and judicial authority until independence, and is counted a success.
  • UNMIK in Kosovo (1999– ) assumed civil administration under resolution 1244 and survives in reduced form a quarter-century later — an interim arrangement outliving every plan to replace it.
• The sovereignty objection under Article 2(7), which bars UN intervention in matters essentially within domestic jurisdiction, is the standing legal and political counter-argument.
  • Non-intervention is not a technicality for states whose independence is recent. Intervention has historically been the practice of strong states in weak ones, dressed as order, protection or invitation, and treated in law as dictatorial interference rather than assistance.
  • The Global South’s suspicion is therefore that protection mandates are intervention by other means and by other hands — a suspicion the Libya episode converted into conviction for several major members, and which now shapes every negotiation over robust mandates. The answer that Article 2(7) does not prejudice Chapter VII has never dissolved it.
• The record is genuinely mixed rather than uniformly bad, and the honest assessment turns on that.
  • On one side: Namibia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Timor-Leste and Côte d’Ivoire — wars ended, armies demobilised, elections held, no relapse.
  • On the other: Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, eastern Congo and Mali — missions present while the worst happened.
  • What separates the lists is not the size or robustness of the mission but whether a political settlement existed that the parties wanted implemented. That is what HIPPO compressed into the primacy of politics, and it is the strongest empirical claim the subject has.

Peacekeeping works where the war is already over in the minds of those fighting it, and fails where it is asked to end a war by its presence.

Peacebuilding

• Peacebuilding is action to support the structures that consolidate peace and prevent relapse — institutions, rule of law, security-sector reform, livelihoods, reconciliation and inclusive politics. The term entered UN usage with An Agenda for Peace and acquired machinery only in 2005.
• The problem is empirical: a substantial share of civil wars that end recur within a decade, and missions have withdrawn after an election to watch the settlement unravel.

The 2005 architecture

• The World Summit of September 2005 created a three-part architecture, established by concurrent resolutions of 20 December 2005 — A/RES/60/180 and S/RES/1645.
  • The Peacebuilding Commission, an advisory body whose Organizational Committee has 31 members — seven elected by the Security Council, seven by ECOSOC, seven by the General Assembly, five from the largest financial contributors and five from the largest troop and police contributors — working through country configurations chaired by member states.
  • The Peacebuilding Fund, a voluntary instrument for rapid, catalytic financing between a ceasefire and the arrival of development assistance.
  • The Peacebuilding Support Office, a small Secretariat unit servicing both.
• The Commission’s powers are advisory and nothing more. It may bring integrated strategies to the Council’s attention; it cannot instruct the Council, the Secretariat, the agencies or the donors, and it holds no budget of its own.

Why it has underperformed

• No authority over the Security Council. The Council keeps the mandate and the leverage; the Commission advises and is heard when convenient.
• Weak country ownership. Early configurations were criticised for externally drafted strategies for governments that had not asked for them, and for stigmatising states placed on a post-conflict list.
• Thin and unpredictable financing. The Fund is voluntary, small against need and hostage to donor mood. Assembly decisions of 2022 and 2023 opened the way to assessed contributions of US$50 million a year; the 2025 review pointedly declined to reaffirm it.

Reviews and the sustaining-peace reframing

• The architecture is reviewed every five years. The 2010 review found it had fallen short; the 2015 review, The Challenge of Sustaining Peace, was the substantive one.
• Its central move was conceptual: peacebuilding should not be a post-conflict activity but a continuum running before, during and after conflict, and therefore inseparable from prevention.
  • This was adopted in the twin resolutions of 27 April 2016 — A/RES/70/262 and S/RES/2282 — which introduced “sustaining peace” as both goal and process, nationally owned and inclusive of women and youth. It relocates peacebuilding from the aftermath of war to the whole life of a conflict, and makes prevention an organisational responsibility rather than a preference.
• The 2020 review was essentially a rollover. The 2025 review, concluded by twin resolutions A/RES/80/11 and S/RES/2805 of 26 November 2025, was more substantive but exposed the divisions.
  • It strengthened the Commission’s bridging, advisory and convening roles and provided for systematic engagement with regional organisations.
  • It failed to agree predictable financing, dropped explicit gender-monitoring and youth language, diluted the provisions linking the Commission to the Council, and repeats “within existing resources” throughout — dozens of new tasks and no new money.

The liberal-peacebuilding critique

• Roland Paris argued that peacebuilding operations pursued rapid democratisation and market liberalisation in societies whose institutions could not absorb them, and that elections and economic opening in weak states intensify the competition they were meant to channel. His prescription — “institutionalisation before liberalisation” — is to build the state’s capacity to manage conflict before introducing open political and market competition.
• Oliver Richmond and the critical literature go further: internationally led peacebuilding exports a template of the liberal state — elections, markets, formal rule of law, a professional army — regardless of local political order, producing a “virtual peace” that satisfies donors and leaves the population outside the settlement.
  • The alternative here is the hybrid peace and the local turn: attention to indigenous authority, customary justice and everyday agency, with peace emerging from the friction between international design and local practice rather than by transplantation.
• Séverine Autesserre’s field-based critique is that peacebuilders privilege national and capital-city processes over the local conflicts — land, cattle, chieftaincy, mining — that actually drive violence, and that a professional culture of short tours, security bubbles and expatriate metrics insulates them from what they claim to know.

Peacekeeping in 2026

• Eleven operations remain, the fewest in decades: MINURSO, MINUSCA, MONUSCO, UNDOF, UNFICYP, UNIFIL, UNISFA, UNMIK, UNMISS, UNMOGIP and UNTSO — five of them predating 1980.
• The direction is contraction. MINUSMA closed in 2023, with the Sudan and Iraq political missions following; UNIFIL received its final renewal by resolution 2790 of 28 August 2025, running to 31 December 2026 and then drawdown and withdrawal over a year; the Yemen mission is preparing a liquidation plan; the Somalia transition mission completes handover by 31 October 2026; and drawdowns in the Central African Republic and Abyei are under discussion.
• No new peacekeeping operation has been created in years. The Council’s recent authorisations of force — a gang-suppression force for Haiti and a stabilisation force for Gaza — went to non-UN coalitions rather than blue helmets.
• The cash crisis is the proximate cause. Unpaid contributions across the organisation approached US$1.6 billion in late 2025, concentrated overwhelmingly in one member, and the 2026–27 budget fell to US$5.1 billion. A Fifth Committee decision in 2026 easing the rule that forces return of unspent balances is the first structural repair to the liquidity problem in decades.
• The operating environment has changed faster than the doctrine.
  • Armed uncrewed aerial vehicles are now within reach of non-state groups, giving them cheap force projection against fixed bases and convoys, while improvised explosive devices remain the leading cause of peacekeeper deaths and drive the armoured, static posture the Cruz report condemned.
  • Disinformation campaigns against missions have made hostility from host populations a strategic vulnerability. Missions in Mali and the Congo faced mass protests fed by claims that peacekeepers were arming rebels or extracting minerals, which is why A4P+ made strategic communications a standing priority.
• Great-power disinterest is the underlying condition. The Council is divided on Ukraine and Gaza, the largest funder is retrenching, host states prefer bilateral security partners with fewer human-rights conditions, and no member is proposing new deployments.

The two live alternatives

• Regional operations funded from assessed contributions. Security Council resolution 2719 of 21 December 2023 created a framework under which African Union-led peace support operations authorised by the Council may draw up to 75% of their costs from UN assessed contributions, decided case by case, with the balance mobilised jointly by the AU and the UN.
  • It is the most significant institutional change in peace operations in a decade and a revitalised reading of Chapter VIII: the Council retains authorisation, the regional organisation supplies the force. The unresolved questions are accountability for civilian harm where the UN funds but does not command, and the risk that the Council delegates responsibility while keeping the credit.
  • Implementation has stalled. The first test, the African Union mission in Somalia, foundered on United States objections to the financing formula, and no operation has yet been funded under the framework. A review falls due at the end of 2026.
• Ad hoc coalitions of the willing, authorised by the Council but nationally commanded, are the other route — faster, better equipped, answerable only to their capitals.
• Whether this is a trough or a decline is the honest open question. Peacekeeping contracted after the Congo and again after Somalia, and expanded when political conditions returned. What is different now is that the contraction is driven at once by financing, great-power division, host-state refusal and the exhaustion of the model in the conflicts that actually exist — and three of those four are getting worse.

India in UN peacekeeping

• India is the largest cumulative contributor of peacekeepers in the organisation’s history — official Indian figures put the total above 290,000 personnel across more than fifty of the seventy-odd missions since 1948.
• It has also lost more peacekeepers than any other member state, approaching 180 fatalities, and Indian personnel have repeatedly received the Dag Hammarskjöld Medal awarded posthumously.
• The early record is foundational rather than incidental. India chaired the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission in Korea and supplied its custodian force, handling the prisoner-of-war question that had deadlocked the armistice; chaired the International Commissions for Supervision and Control in Indochina created by the Geneva Accords of 1954; contributed to UNEF I from 1956; and made one of the largest contributions to ONUC, where an Indian brigade fought in the operations that ended the Katangese secession.
• Current deployment is around 5,000 personnel across most of the eleven active missions, including the Golan, Lebanon, Cyprus, the Congo, South Sudan, Abyei and the Central African Republic. The Centre for United Nations Peacekeeping in New Delhi trains several thousand Indian and foreign personnel a year.
• India’s doctrinal positions are long-standing: troop contributors must be consulted, not briefed, which is the Article 44 argument; caution about robust and offensive mandates, which compromise consent and impartiality and expose soldiers to risks their governments never agreed; insistence on host-state consent and on the primacy of a political settlement; and timely financing with zero tolerance of misconduct.
• India’s wider UN diplomacy, including its claim to a permanent seat, belongs with India’s engagement with the UN system as a whole; what matters here is that the peacekeeping record is the substantive basis on which that wider claim is argued.

Assessment

• Peacekeeping is the most successful improvisation in the history of international organisation and the least defensible on paper. With no Charter basis, no standing force, no independent revenue and no power to compel, it has nonetheless separated armies, run elections, demobilised combatants and kept a great many people alive who would otherwise be dead.
• Its failures are not random. They cluster wherever the Council has asked a consent-based instrument to do a coercive job, and wherever a mandate was written without the resources to make it achievable. The reform chain says so each time, and the Council keeps doing it.
• Peacekeeping has been asked to substitute for the political settlement it cannot itself supply, and that substitution is no longer affordable. The contraction under way is not a redesign but what happens when capacity is set by the payment behaviour of the largest debtor. Whether what emerges — smaller focused missions, regional forces on UN money, coalitions under national command — is adaptation or abdication is the question the next decade will answer.