Peacekeeping: UN Peacemaking in Peril
November 8, 2025: UN peacekeeping missions have become a thing of that past. There are fewer of them and in a growing number of cases peacekeepers have been replaced by the International Crisis Group. Since 1945 there have been 70 UN peacekeeping missions and currently eleven of them are still active. These include Haiti, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Abyei South Sudan, Rwanda, Kosovo, Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel/Syria, Middle East, India/Pakistan. Over the next decade this list may get smaller, when two or three peacekeeping missions are terminated. It’s difficult to predict which ones because there are so many variables.
There are some other problems. NGO/Non-Government Organizations will sometimes ask, or demand, that the UN or other foreign governments send in peacekeeping troops to protect the NGOs from hostile locals. This had disastrous effects in Somalia during the early 1990s. Some NGOs remained, or came back, to Somalia after the peacekeepers left. These NGOs learned how to cope on their own. They hired local gunmen for protection, as well as cutting deals with the local warlords. But eventually the local Islamic radicals became upset at the alien ideas these Western do-gooders brought with them, and chased all NGOs out.
In eastern Congo, aid workers found themselves the primary target of the local bandits and militias that had created the problems that attracted the foreign aid in the first place. NGOs have learned to raise militias when they want to. But in areas where there are peacekeepers, and the NGOs believe they are not being well served, the NGOs will often simply depart, amid a flurry of press releases, to show their displeasure at the security arrangements, or the political goals of the peacekeepers.
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htun/articles/202511086245.aspx#gsc.tab=0
