More than complementary: The rise of regional peace operations.

 The slow demise of UN peacekeeping is not tantamount to the end of multilateral peace missions. While the UN Charter reserves the UN Security Council monopoly on legitimately launching peace operations, other international organizations have either been delegated this right by the Security Council or sometimes ignored this rule in practice, and the number of regional organizations emerging as recognized peacekeepers increased since the end of the Cold War. This evolution reflects both an activation of the original division of labour within the UN Charter, but was also a reaction to the shrinking support of Westerns states to UN peace operations since the mid-1990s. Regional organizations thus offered the only available conflict management responses to ongoing civil wars, although some parts of the world have apparently solved conflicts without multilateral peace operations.

While the UN has not deployed new military peacekeeping operations since 2014,3 more than ten such missions have been started by other organizations in Africa alone. This category combines both official peacekeeping missions by regional organizations but also ad hoc missions, such as the Multinational Joint Task ForceAccra Initiative (MNJTF-AI) to fight terrorism in West African countries. Compared to UN missions, ad hoc coalitions can be established on relatively short notice to deal with a specific crisis situation, and might still mobilize funding from the EU and other actors if endorsed by the UN Security Council or a regional organization like the African Union’s (AU) Peace and Security Council (Coleman/Williams 2021: 248). In 2024, the number of African-led missions has surpassed UN missions active on the African continent for the first time [see Figure 4]. 

Globally, the UN, Regional peace operations had originally been conceptualized as being complementary, but also subsidiary to UN peace operations. This is also the logic of the UN Charter with its separation of Chapter VII and VIII. Several key UN documents of the last decade have however moved from thinking entirely in terms of subsidiarity towards greater “partnership peacekeeping”. The New Agenda for Peace puts strong emphasis on regional operations as “critical building blocks for the networked multilateralism envisaged” (UN 2023: 12) and UN support to these rather than deploying UN peacekeeping operations as such. As more “robust” UN operations seem to challenge principles and exceed capabilities, regional operations might be the solution for maintaining multilateral peacekeeping. Evidence concerning such partnerships shows that over the last two decades the UN-EU partnership has lost most of its operational relevance and turned towards a more political relationship. The EU served as an exit strategy for the UN in Bosnia and in Chad. At the UN’s request, it has additionally undertaken short-term military stabilization operations in the DRC and Central African Republic. With the EU now concentrating on training and capacity building missions in Europe, Middle East, Caucasus, and Africa, its relationship to the UN has become less crucial. Much more critical is the evolution of cooperation between UN and African regional organizations, particularly the AU. Since the creation of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) in 2002, around 40 African-led peace operations have been launched, with the majority led by the AU, but also by the regional economic communities (RECs) (such as the Economic Community of West AfricanStates (ECOWAS)) and ad hoc coalitions (such as the G5 Sahel Joint Force). We thus observe an increasing heterogeneity of African peace operations. The APSA was built on the assumption that RECs serve as pillars of a continental framework with the AU coordinating and mandating peace operations. In practice, there is a relatively strong fragmentation and overlap, and the ad hoc coalitions might weaken the legitimacy of the formal structures established two decades ago. Regional peace operations might be more likely candidates for robust mandates and peace enforcement, as they can have different rules defining peacekeeping than the traditional UN principles of impartiality and non-use of force. Based on their founding treaties and additional protocols, both AU and ECOWAS might mandate peace operations which do not require the consent of the main conflict parties or the minimum use of force. Regional and ad hoc coalitions might also offer a legal and political alternative to UN peace operations with less emphasis on human rights, international humanitarian law, and protection of civilians. Some ad hoc interventions have failed to get international recognition as peace operations, such as the Southern African Development Community intervention in DRC (1998), or the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (2003). The most problematic aspect of “partnership” peacekeeping has been the trend of some African host governments turning to additional security “partners” with UN missions still active on their territories. Both the governments of Central African Republic (2017) and Mali (2022) invited Russian private security providers into their country, sometimes active in the same areas as UN missions, and partly entering into conflict with UN officials. In 2022, the DRC government invited a coalition of East African countries to deploy a peace enforcement mission in the eastern DRC to combat rebel movements that the UN had failed to defeat, before requesting in 2024 an intervention by Southern African counterparts to escalate operations in the east. In both cases, there was little idea of how these various coalitions would cooperate with the UN mission. Host communities might also no longer be able to distinguish between the UN and parallel forces, or actions undertaken by a partner mission might erode the UN’s credibility and legitimacy, with implications for the security of its peacekeepers. There are, however, also more benign forms of collaboration arrangements. In the past, French military contingents cooperated with UN missions in Côte d’Ivoire or Mali, and small EU missions have supported a much larger UN mission, or bolstered UN response in critical situations (such as in DRC 2003 and 2006).