Over the past eighty years, the evolution of UN peace operations has encountered several critical junctures. Now, UN peace operations have arguably reached another turning point with the decline in the number of UN-led multidimensional missions and a growing role for partners, including regional and subregional organizations. This has led to calls to examine how peace operations are conceived, mandated, structured, and led, and several review processes are ongoing. It is important that these processes consider not only the supply side of peace operations but also the demand side—in other words, to take conflict settings as the starting point and work backward to determine the type of intervention needed.

Within this context, IPI organized a series of scenario-based workshops to brainstorm potential responses to a mix of real and hypothetical scenarios. The first workshop was held over two days in Addis Ababa in January 2025 in partnership with the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). A second workshop was held in New York in March 2025. The workshops brought together civilian, military, and police representatives of the UN, African Union (AU), subregional organizations, and member states, as well as independent experts.

This paper reflects on several key considerations that emerged from these workshops:

• The UN Security Council and UN Secretariat should work together to ensure that mandates and mission activities are driven by clear political strategies that address politics at the local, national, regional, and international levels.
• The Secretariat should establish a standing and integrated operational planning team in the shared regional divisions to facilitate a shift from templated approaches to context-specific, demand-driven approaches.
• Field missions should have enhanced capacity to develop operational responses to scenarios based on their current mandate or possible changes to their mandate.
• Member states and the Secretariat should explore how to operationalize modular approaches to mission configurations to foster more flexible and targeted mission mandates.
• Troop- and police-contributing countries (T/PCCs) should provide more specialized and targeted contributions to match missions’ capabilities to new mission approaches and current demands.
• Building on their commitments in the Pact for the Future, member states should demonstrate leadership by actively contributing to the ongoing reviews of peace operations and by providing a clear political direction to the work of the Secretariat.

These lessons can feed into several ongoing and upcoming policy processes, including the UN peacekeeping ministerial, the review on the future of peace operations, the ten-year review of the report of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO), and the review of the UN peacebuilding architecture.