Peacekeeping

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Photo Credit: globalsolutions.org
As part of its responsibility to maintain international peace and security, the UN Security Council frequently authorizes peacekeeping operations as a means to end conflicts or to preserve shaky peace accords.  Today the UN has over 100,000 peacekeeping personnel in the field - mostly soldiers, but also police and civilian advisors, working in more than a dozen operations.

Peacekeeping missions face many challenges. Although peacekeepers are supposed to maintain peace, their limited mandates do not address the root causes of conflicts.  The UN experiences difficulty in recruiting a sufficient number of well-trained peacekeepers, and providing them with the appropriate equipment. Peacekeeping missions have also been marred by periodic scandals over criminal behavior by their personnel. The General Articles and Analysis on peacekeeping address many of these issues from multiple perspectives.

GPF follows a number of issues related to peacekeeping, as well as some individual peacekeeping missions. The sections on Lessons from Past Experience, analysis on the relations between the UN and the Regional Organizations on peacekeeping, and possibilities for Peacekeeping Reform provide insight into the complex nature of peacekeeping missions. Additionally, GPF looks at US Policy on UN Peacekeeping, and the debate over the activities of the International Criminal Court in relation to peacekeeping.

Information on the specific peacekeeping missions can be found on individual country pages. GPF follows the missions in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Timor Leste, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Haiti, India and Pakistan, Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Lebanon, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan/Darfur, and Western Sahara. Some material on other missions can be found throughout this section. GPF also provides a list of past missions.

We offer extensive Data Tables on Peacekeeping.   The tables show countries’ troop contributions and highlights how the size of operations has changed. There are also detailed tables on Peacekeeping Finance, showing the size of the budgets and who pays what.  Taken together, these tables reveal that rich countries pay and poor countries fight.
There are also Links and Resources on peacekeeping for additional information.