The future of Multilateral Peace operations - Three scenarios.

 

In many ways, the structural environment for multilateral peacekeeping has thus changed. With a divided UN Security Council and lingering support among UN leadership and within member states, the UN is unlikely to return any time soon to multidimensional peace operations with robust mandates, although a minimum consensus for renewing mandates of existing missions has always been reached so far. Russia and China have become increasingly critical about the related sanctions regimes and arms embargoes against the governments that host these peacekeeping missions. “As a result, there has arguably been a steady reduction in the political space for proactive, unified Security Council responses to new and emerging crises”. Moreover, the UN has also been blocked regarding recent major conflicts outside Africa, such as the wars in Syria, Ukraine and Gaza. In this context, three different scenarios for the future of multilateral peace operations can be distinguished

Despite all dramatic geopolitical changes, the idea of multilateral peace operations could prove to be resilient, while materializing in a variety of pathways. In this scenario the UN would remain the normative and material centre of international peacekeeping, and continue to support a range of non-UN or UN-authorized peace operations with technical, financial, or logistical assistance. The UN would also retain unparalleled authority and legitimacy to convene key stakeholders when crises erupt. The Pact for the Future in September 2024 confirmed UN member state commitment for Peacebuilding but requested the Secretary-General to undertake a review of all forms of UN peace operations. In such a scenario, the UN might continue with some few larger multidimensional peace operations, but mostly concentrate on its mediation work through the provision of good offices and the deployment of SPMs, even in Syria or Yemen, where Special Envoy Offices have been established. An open question in this regard is, however, whether the past effectiveness of such civilian and diplomatic approaches has not been linked to the parallel employment of military force within peace operations. Both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and EU, as well as African organizations have proven their capacity to deploy larger peace operations. Should both the UN and regional organizations be involved in parallel missions in the same conflict theatre, cooperation could certainly be strengthened, either in a sequential logic (as has already happened between AU and UN) or in a more systematic division of tasks. This also emerges from the Independent Study on The Future of Peacekeeping commissioned by the UN in the wake of the Pact for the Future. The three experts propose a modular approach consisting of 30 different mission models, ranging from protection of civilians, and election security to cultural heritage protection and border management. Such a modular approach will allow future missions “to be tailored to unique situations, […] and to adapt them over time and think through a wide range of partnerships, both inside and beyond the UN system”. From such a perspective, the diversity of actual peace operations is no longer regarded as an indicator for fragmentation and coordination challenges, but rather as a sign for pragmatism and for institutional innovation. At the same time, this strategy would also imply the clear recognition of many things UN peace operations cannot do in a given context. 

The risk which comes with such a pragmatic approach to peace operations is that the UN might no longer be accepted as the legitimate orchestrator of global peace operations. So far, nearly all peace operations by organizations other than the UN have been authorized or at least recognized by the UN. The strong urge to strengthen regionalization of peace operations, evident also in Guterres’s New Agenda for Peace – in which he offers support for building and rebuilding regional frameworks where there are not yet any – might also strengthen the idea of each region being responsible for its own peacekeeping, according to its own norms, and with a special expertise to deal with its own conflicts. This trend might also be observed in Europe with its new massive own security pressures.

Even in the current context we already observe ad hoc coalitions not only going it alone, but also without the authorization of the UN Security Council. There is obviously a historical legacy of global powers acting without blessing of the UN Security Council, whether the US-led coalition in Iraq, or Russia in Georgia. The UN collective security system was never fully effective, with veto-members in the Security Council, the so-called “Permanent Five” (P5) protecting key allies from peace missions, or regional hegemons in Africa preventing African regional organizations from dealing with conflict situations on their territory. While UN and UN-authorized peace missions were based on the key principle of impartiality and the idea to uphold some kind of collective security system, in this second scenario we see a growing number of such operations becoming more tailored to the achievement of specific political and military objectives, whether of intervening states or incumbent governments. Unilateral interventions and those based on “bilateral” agreements were the prerogative of global powers in the past (such as France’s military interventionism in West Africa). We now observe countries such as Rwanda launching peace enforcement operations in other states with explicit host state consent (Central African Republic, Mozambique, Benin), but outside any mandate of African regional organizations. New international actors emerge, well-resourced mediators and dealmakers such as the Gulf Arab states, but their diplomatic activities seem hardly aligned to UN and AU mediation, and might include hidden unilateral military intervention. Informal “minilateral” coalitions and contact groups mobilize diplomatic resources which formalized international organizations lack, yet might also become forums for competition between actors with different ideas and interests regarding the conflict at hand. Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, but also China’s and (more recently) the U.S.’s aggressive hegemonic claims, which are backed by open military posture, are a clear indicator of the return of coercive power (and credible military threats). While powerful states might be able to afford to go it alone, for many states (and their populations) in the Global South, this scenario is much less attractive. Rejection of multilateral peace operations might be a perfect populist move, but a global order without effective multilateral peacekeeping reduces the real exercise of sovereignty for many affected states and will increase the appetite of would-be hegemons.

Since the 1990s UN peace operations were turning multidimensional not only insofar as they aimed at objectives larger than monitoring ceasefires, but also because they started to employ a wide range of instruments, military and non-military, to reach these objectives. UN thinking embedded peacekeeping within the broader concept of peacebuilding, including preventive and post-conflict instruments, such as early warning, or the facilitation of political dialogue after the cessation of violence. Even where peace missions were operating amid violence, non-military practices were institutionalized, especially regarding mediation, protection of civilians and monitoring of human rights. The success of past UN multidimensional missions is attributed not only to the effective maintenance of security, but also to the missions’ capacity to (re-)build rule of law, training of police forces, and securing a safe environment for humanitarian assistance.

In a third scenario, civilian aspects and political goals of peace missions are maintained and strengthened even in the absence of UN multidimensional operations. This could happen through two mechanisms. First, non-UN peace missions become more multidimensional by expanding their toolbox of non-military peacekeeping measures. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) data on multilateral peace operations show that so far nearly all African peace operations are predominantly military missions, with some few police units, while nearly all current Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and EU missions are civilian (Pfeifer Cruz 2025: 14–15). The SIPRI focus on peace operations hides, however, the many non-military instruments that AU or ECOWAS have applied, most of which are employed independent of officially mandated peace operations (early warning, special envoys, mediation, electoral observation).4 While more research is needed in understanding the many interfaces between military and non-military intervention practices, there is certainly a strong trajectory of civilian and political components of peace building (for example regarding anti-coup policies) which could be further developed and integrated. A second mechanism consists in a stronger integration of existing local, national, and UN-led peacebuilding structures into international intervention practices. Both the heavy international support for peacebuilding throughout the last four decades, and the local resistance against it, have strengthened local capacities and mobilized local, national and transnational networks of peace actors. Interestingly, Guterres’s New Agenda for Peace also puts emphasis on “national infrastructures for peace” as the UN’s key task in peacebuilding. This is a concept which has a long heritage in peace research and was introduced to the policy debates by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in the early 2000s to promote multilayered peace networks which make best use of different local traditions, resources, and norms of peacebuilding. In some countries it also triggered the formalization of institutional structures anchored within peace ministries or national peace councils. Guterres’s approach mainly consists in appealing to governments and societal actors to jointly develop strategies about how to address domestic conflicts, rather than looking for international actors such as the UN to provide solutions. The UN’s role would then consist in providing expertise and funding to national peace infrastructures, building on the work of the UN Peacebuilding Commission and Fund