Over the past 70 years, UN peacekeeping has proven highly resilient and adaptive in response to changing threats to international peace and security and shifting political dynamics in the Security Council. These operations are a cost-effective response to armed conflict and a relatively successful means to reestablish stability and enable lasting peace agreements.

Today, UN peacekeeping must once again navigate a divided Security Council, growing disagreement over underlying normative principles, and financial pressure. At the same, involvement by great powers and regional powers in intrastate conflict, violent extremism and terrorism, highly fragmented armed groups, and intercommunal violence are testing the boundaries of what UN peacekeeping can achieve. Recent UN transitions, meanwhile, have underscored peacekeeping’s limitations in addressing structural drivers of violence, including weak state institutions, social injustice, and corruption.

Yet the focus of reform efforts by UN and member states is on improving contemporary peacekeeping missions. There are few, if any, opportunities for strategic engagement to anticipate the future of peacekeeping: how conflict trends and geopolitical shifts may affect future demand for UN deployments, including what doctrinal changes, capabilities, or partnerships may be required to adapt peacekeeping so that it remains an effective tool for responding to pressing international security challenges.

To help inform the Security Council’s decision making and the UN Secretariat’s policy development, IPI aims to identify major trends likely to shape the future of UN peacekeeping over the coming decade, ways in which it needs to adapt, and recommendations on how to do so, including decision points for the secretary-general, Security Council, other member states, and other stakeholders.