Are peace operations enabling authoritarian conflict management?

I was hoping to write a commentary on the report on the peace operations review this week, but we’re just going to have to keep waiting.

When the Fifth Committee concluded its negotiations on peacekeeping financing on 30 June, the agreement on changing the credit return methodology understandably attracted the most attention. What slipped under the radar, however, is the failure of the Fifth Committee to take advantage of the rare temporal conjunction this year of the periodic reviews of the personnel reimbursement (every four years) and contingent-owned equipment (every three years) systems to begin addressing the many shortcomings of the existing patchwork of arrangements.

I’ve previously pointed out some of the operational shortcomings of these systems. They create the wrong incentives for contemporary peace operations and, as a result, reinforce reactive postures and risk aversion on the part of individual units, impede meaningful accountability for performance, and make it difficult to generate the new and specialized capabilities required to respond to new threats and challenges.

But there are also strategic shortcomings. The nature of contemporary operations and the existing reimbursement arrangements makes participation in UN peacekeeping operations—as well as non-UN operations where reimbursement is paid on the basis of UN policies and standards—particularly attractive to low-income troop- and police-contributing countries (T/PCCs), particularly those with authoritarian tendencies. These are often also the countries that have the fewest qualms about the use of force and about engaging in peace enforcement and counterterrorism operations.

They’re also the ones accelerating the slide of peace operations towards authoritarian conflict management.

Over the past two decades, many scholars and researchers have drawn attention to the discrediting of liberal peacebuilding amidst the backdrop of a broader decline in commitment to the tenets of liberal internationalism. Authoritarian conflict management is one of the contenders that has been gaining traction as an alternative.

What does it entail?

ACM entails the prevention, de-escalation or termination of organised armed rebellion … through methods that eschew genuine negotiations among parties to the conflict, reject international mediation and constraints on the use of force, disregard calls to address underlying structural causes of conflict, and instead rely on instruments of state coercion and hierarchical structures of power.1

UN peacekeeping was never intended to promote illiberal outcomes, let alone authoritarian approaches to conflict management. Indeed, multidimensional peacekeeping emerged after the end of the Cold War to help implement comprehensive peace agreements and address the myriad drivers of conflict. In 1992, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali set out the conceptual framework for multidimensional missions in his landmark report, titled An Agenda for Peace, in which he introduced the concept of peacebuilding to the UN.

In the early post-Cold War period, the majority of troops came from countries that shared a commitment to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law—the same liberal principles that underpinned peacebuilding and multidimensional peacekeeping operations. In 1990, the top T/PCCs to UN peacekeeping operations were Canada, Finland, Austria, Norway, and Ghana.2

But the surge in peacekeeping operations and the shift of Western T/PCCs to Afghanistan and Iraq drove change in the composition of countries participating in peacekeeping. Initially, many of the new T/PCCs were new democracies,3 but—especially as peacekeeping operations began to more narrowly focus on physical protection and stabilization—the UN began to increasingly rely on T/PCCs with authoritarian tendencies which were more interested and willing to take on tasks involving greater use of force in increasingly challenging environments.4

Of today’s top 10 T/PCCs, only one is rated as “free” by Freedom House, and all but two are classified as autocracies under the Regimes of the World dataset.5

One of the features of the post-Cold War era is the emergence of what Nina Wilén and Paul D. Williams have described as “peacekeeping armies” by countries that have adapted their militaries to better align with the requirements (and associated administrative processes) of contemporary peacekeeping operations. They explain that states develop “peacekeeping armies” for various reasons. For example,

reconstructing national and international identities to acquire international status and domestic legitimacy appear to be key factors. But regime maintenance through coup-proofing may also feature, both by physically distancing security forces and by using financial benefits to buttress their loyalty. The most prominent motivations are thus found within the political, economic and institutional domains.6

The majority of countries that have developed peacekeeping armies are lower-income authoritarian states. These are countries that benefit financially from peacekeeping given that the reimbursement provided by the United Nations exceeds the expenses incurred by T/PCCs, often dramatically.7 But they are also countries that “are likely to have a higher tolerance for casualties and face less public pressure for transparency and accountability than democratic contributing countries” and therefore accept deployment to more dangerous contexts.8

At a time when large multidimensional peacekeeping missions have effectively abandoned the basic principle of impartiality, missions can also serve as a vehicle for T/PCCs to pursue their own political, security, and economic interests in the countries in question. Peter Albrecht makes a case that Mali and Somalia are examples in which individual T/PCCs have effectively used multilateral peace operations as a cover for proxy warfare.9 I would also argue that, when authoritarian T/PCCs with peacekeeping armies participate in multilateral peace operations to support authoritarian host governments in maintaining power, they are effectively engaging in a modern version of state mercenarism.

As Allard Duursma and John Gledhill have noted,

much of the ‘everyday’ work of liberal peacebuilding is now being executed by troops that are sent into the field by illiberal governments. Beyond the fact that democracies may be freeriding off the contributions of autocratic states, a proliferation of troops from illiberal regimes may be undermining the efficacy of the so-called liberal peace project.10

As a result of all of these trends, the militarized model of multilateral peace operations that is now dominant has been subverted from its original liberal objectives to enable authoritarian conflict management in several ways. For one, they reinforce host state capacity for repression.11 But—given the opportunity for financial profit and access to valuable capacity-building that comes with participation in multilateral peace operations—they also build T/PCC capacity for repression by allowing those countries to maintain much larger armies than they otherwise would be able to. And they also provide a veneer of legitimacy for states seeking to pursue their own interests in a particular country.

So what does this mean moving forward?

First, the Secretariat needs to be more strategic about selection of T/PCCs. Despite the opportunity provided by the retrenchment of peacekeeping operations over the past decade to prioritize effectiveness and alignment with values, a recent study of peacekeeping contributions covering the period from 2010 to 2024 suggests that the size of a country’s deployment has a greater impact than the operational utility of its troops on the extent to which it is affected by drawdowns in troop and police strength, with mid-sized T/PCCs bearing the brunt of reductions.12

Last year, a quarter of the total deployed troop and police strength in peace operations had to be repatriated in response to the United States not paying the majority of its assessed contributions for peacekeeping operations. There is every indication that peacekeeping operations will continue to experience major funding shortfalls during the 2026/27 financial period driven by non-payment by the United States (and likely withholding by China for the UN Support Office for Haiti), and so the Secretariat will inevitably have to make some tough decisions again soon.

Second, the UN needs to stop privileging the support office model as the modality in which the Secretariat engages in conflicts, with the UN playing a secondary role providing logistical and financial support to a non-UN force. These have only served to reinforce the primacy of the military and, in doing so, promote authoritarian conflict management approaches at the expense of solutions that address the underlying social, political, and economic drivers of conflict.

Finally, and to bring the discussion back to the issue of reimbursement, member states need to begin the process of putting in place a new approach to reimbursement, one that not only addresses the operational shortcomings of the existing approach, but which also reduces the financial incentives that make participation in peacekeeping so lucrative and attractive to authoritarian T/PCCs. Although the current approach to personnel reimbursement was intended to restore an empirical basis to the setting of rates, the self-referential inclusion of UN reimbursement payments as part of the allowance data collected has only served to artificially inflate reimbursement rates to such an extent that they no longer have any bearing on the actual additional costs incurred by T/PCCs.

Participation in peacekeeping should not be a financial burden to contributing countries. But it should not become the means by which to bankroll and cultivate the tools of authoritarian conflict management.

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© 2026 Eugene Chen under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations University.