A peacekeeping mission is a deployment of lightly armed UN forces in the field with the consent of belligerents in order to monitor any agreements and deter any would-be spoilers. Such missions can also change incentives for war by making peace more appealing or war more costly. Peacekeeping missions often involve complex interpositional roles and may include policing, demobilisation and disarmament (DDR), institution building, police and security force reform, elections supervision, humanitarian work, economic development and more.
Unlike previous doctrines that focused on observation or merely monitoring peace, which the UN had previously defined as peacekeeping, Boutros-Ghali’s new peacekeeping doctrine sought to implement robust and comprehensive settlements, and this required a greater role for military and police personnel. He and others argued that peacekeeping could be used to help create conditions for self-sustaining peace and, more importantly, prevent recidivism, the tendency for countries to return to violence after a conflict has ended.
Since then, UN peacekeeping has evolved into a highly complex and multidimensional field operation with an impressive set of capabilities, including unmatched international legitimacy, singular force generation and deployment capacities with personnel from across the globe, experience conducting joint military, police and civilian activities and flexible financial systems that work for rapid start-up and sustained efforts to advance multi-dimensional missions. In addition, UN peacekeeping costs are typically one-eighth of comparable U.S. deployments and, importantly, do not involve American troops on the ground. This is possible because of an outsized voice in globally shaping every mission, veto power and unique political capital, and the contributions of 121 countries that provide troops, police and civilian personnel to the global peacekeeping effort.
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