Despite many setbacks, most of these
UN missions helped end insurgencies,
backstop elections and provide political stability in countries including Liberia
and Côte d’Ivoire. Research has established that most of these missions were
considered successful. Assessment of the UN missions were however overshadowed by the disastrous non-UN-led interventions
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, the
UN multidimensional peace operations which
were eventually deployed to Mali and Central African Republic (MINUSMA 2013,
MINUSCA 2014), took over the stabilization agenda which had characterized the
Western-led intervention in Afghanistan. In fact, the four missions in Mali, Central
African Republic, DRC and Haiti were authorized with the explicit mandate to
stabilize countries in which no peace agreements had been reached yet, mandated
with
protecting civilians and governments against an aggressor or general destabilization, amidst ongoing violence, while at the same time being part of a larger
process that seeks
a political settlement for the conflict.
The overall number of UN (military, police and civilian) peacekeepers had
gradually increased to a record level of 126,247 by April 2015, but since 2014 no major
UN peacekeeping operation has been established, and the UN also closed
some larger operations in Côte d’Ivoire, Darfur, Haiti, Liberia, and more recently,
Mali. By May 2025, 11 peacekeeping operations were still active (with a total of
68,784 peacekeepers), with the remaining three large missions (DRC, Central
African Republic, South Sudan) in the process of further downsizing. Instead
of UN peacekeeping operations, the
UN Security Council has deployed
Special Political Missions (SPMs) which employ political and diplomatic instruments to
promote peace, yet typically cannot protect civilians due to lack of military units.
The gradual “uploading” of stabilization into UN practice reflected both a changing international context and increasing consensus among
members of the UN Security Council to mandate robust operations to
contain aggressors and spoilers in the midst of conflict, as well as the different
type of conflict theatres where it was impossible to stick to traditional notions
of peacekeeping. The turn towards stabilization had several problematic effects
which explain its meagre popularity within UN bureaucracy, but also the lack of
major diplomatic protest, when Mali effectively decided in 2023 not to extend the
UN peace operation.
We need first to consider what de Coning has called the stabilization dilemma. The more effectively a peace operation protects civilians and
helps to achieve stability, the less incentive there is for ruling political elites to
find long-term political solutions. All parties somehow assume that the state
is likely to collapse, or to lose significant parts of its territory to armed groups,
should the
peacekeeping operation withdraw. As a result, the
Security Council keeps these operations in place without a proper exit-strategy. Although all these
operations are tasked with mediation and good offices mandates, it has, second,
proven more and more difficult to promote a political project for sustaining peace.
The respective governments have tried to limit the political role the UN mission
might play, and “non-state armed groups may not necessarily see the UN as an
honest broker if it has engaged in stabilization actions against them”. The
Report of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO Report) in 2015 stressed the “primacy of politics”, emphasizing that
UN peacekeeping operations can be effective only when there is a viable political
project they can support and protect
“Lasting peace is not achieved nor sustained by military and technical engagements, but through political solutions. The primacy of politics should be the hallmark of the approach of the United Nations to the resolution of conflict, during
mediation, the monitoring of ceasefires, assistance to the implementation of peace
accords, the management of violent conflicts and longer-term efforts at sustaining
peace” (UN 2015a, para 43).
Third, while earlier generations of UN operations were criticized for the heavy
emphasis on the external engineering of liberal transformation, stabilization
missions tended to turn into illiberal regime-supporting operations, with UN
reluctant to call out government abuses for fear of straining relations, and in the
process even undercutting long-term bottom-up efforts to build peace. According
to Paris, UN practice has tended towards an “authoritarian peacebuilding model” which tends to empower coercive states most of the time.
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