Commentary: We need the United Nations in the peacekeeping business again

Each September, the United Nations General Assembly kicks off its annual session with high-level meetings and pomp and circumstance in New York. This is the forum where the world’s countries come to talk to one another about shared problems and promises.

Headlining this year’s assembly is the Summit of the Future, calling for greater international cooperation on shared challenges such as climate change, poverty and inequality, and artificial intelligence.

These are all urgent issues, but as the U.N. expanded its purview over every new global test, it has significantly lost ground in its core purpose: preventing and ending violent conflict.

The U.N. was established in the aftermath of two devastating world wars, with an explicit mandate to maintain international peace and security and take “effective collective measures” to prevent threats to peace and suppress aggression.

The U.N. Security Council was tasked with deciding what those collective measures would be. For decades, its go-to tool for the most challenging cases was peacekeeping. Peacekeeping is the deployment of multinational military forces and others to help countries transition out of war and avoid a return to violence by monitoring and helping implement peace processes and agreements.

The U.N., however, has dropped the ball here, and it shows. After generations of peace on the rise, recent years have seen conflict rise instead, with a 27% increase in violence just last year, according to the nonprofit group Armed Conflict Location and Event Data. This has driven up civilian deaths in conflict and put displacement at record levels.

As a result, humanitarian needs are up every year, but funding isn’t. This year’s humanitarian appeals have risen by more than $2 billion, while funding commitments are down nearly 20%.

This matters to all of us because the knock-on effects make us all less safe and prosperous. Conflict and displacement disrupt trade in our globalized system; foster extremism, which can target our country and interests overseas; and drive more volatile politics.

Improving or increasing humanitarian relief won’t suffice. The only real answer is for the international system to do a better job addressing the drivers of humanitarian need, which means reducing conflict and violence.

We have a good tool to do so; we just aren’t using it much anymore.

Peacekeeping isn’t perfect. Some of its shortcomings and more egregious outcomes include spurring a cholera outbreak in Haiti, sexual abuse in the Democratic Republic of Congo (and elsewhere), and the failure to protect civilians, despite most missions having an explicit mandate to do so.

How we conduct peacekeeping can certainly be improved, but research has consistently shown that third-party peacekeeping is effective. Peacekeeping generally — and U.N. peacekeeping specifically — saves lives, shortens conflicts and prevents them from reoccurring. Statistical studies have consistently found that peacekeeping is highly effective at preventing violence before it starts, reducing violence during war, and helping belligerents achieve and maintain peace. All quantitative studies on this topic show statistically significant results. Considering that peacekeeping is only used in the hardest cases, these imperfect but positive results are even more impressive. The more U.N. peacekeepers who are committed to a conflict, the fewer civilians and combatants who are killed.

Peacekeeping successes are less well known but far more common than failures. The mission in Namibia in 1989 helped end a civil war, and that country is a stable, middle-income, functioning democracy today. El Salvador’s mission in the early 1990s rapidly demilitarized society and helped usher in sweeping political and institutional reforms essential to keep the peace. The existence today of an independent and peaceful Timor-Leste owes much to its multinational mission.

There are 11 active U.N. peacekeeping missions today, from the small observer mission in Kashmir that has mostly kept the peace since 1949 to the large stabilization mission in the Central African Republic now in its 10th year. But no new missions have been established since 2014, and interest in doing so is low. The budget is in steady decline, down almost $100 million this year and $700 million from the prior year. Why has this tool fallen out of fashion just when we seem to need it most?

Bad press doesn’t help. The stories of peacekeeping successes never draw as much attention as their failures, so the public doesn’t view the decline of peacekeeping as a bad thing.

Great power competition plays a role too. These missions can be launched only by the U.N. Security Council, and its veto-wielding members don’t want to agree to much these days. But stemming the tide of conflict, at least in some cases, should be something even these countries can agree on.

Violence last year cost the global economy an estimated $19 trillion, according to the latest Global Peace Index. Peacekeeping missions are pretty cheap in comparison, at only about$6 billion a year, with the United States covering 25% of the total. Investing more in peace is a bargain. Turning away and letting this growth of conflict worldwide continue will cost us all more in the long run.

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Elizabeth Shackelford is senior policy director at Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center for International Understanding and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is the author of“The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”

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