How Funding Cuts, Global Rivalries Are Weakening UN Peacekeeping Worldwide | Explained

Global troop strength in multilateral peace operations has dropped nearly half since 2016, with the UN system struggling under a $2 billion funding shortfall, deadlocked Security Council decisions, and the absence of credible regional alternatives.

New Delhi: The number of international troops deployed in United Nations peace operations has fallen to its lowest level in at least a quarter century, with troop strength standing at 78,633 in 2025, a 17 per cent drop from 2024 and a 49 per cent collapse from the peak in 2016.

The findings, published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), point to a convergence of funding failures, political paralysis and deepening geopolitical fault lines that are steadily hollowing out the UN’s capacity to manage armed conflict.

SIPRI is an independent international institute that researches conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament. Its annual data on multilateral peace operations is one of the most closely watched barometers of global conflict management.

The 2025 findings make for bleak reading: 58 peace operations were active across 34 countries and territories, down from 61 a year earlier, and three-quarters of all personnel were concentrated in just five missions, four of which were in sub-Saharan Africa.

“If things continue in this way, we could see a dramatic weakening of multilateral conflict management and the near-complete sidelining of institutions like the United Nations,” said Jaïr van der Lijn, director of the SIPRI Peace Operations and Conflict Management Programme.

“The result is likely to be more conflicts, and these conflicts are likely to have even graver impacts on civilians as states abandon long-established norms.”

A $2 billion hole in the peacekeeping budget

The financial picture is stark. By July 2025, UN peacekeeping operations were facing a shortfall of $2 billion – more than 35 per cent of their total $5.6 billion budget for 2024-25.

Major donor states had failed to pay their assessed contributions on time or in full, forcing several operations to make deep cuts to personnel.

The US, historically the single largest financial contributor to UN peacekeeping, has been at the centre of the funding crisis, compounding pressure it has simultaneously applied through diplomatic channels.

In the United Nations Security Council, decision-making on mission mandates has grown increasingly fraught. “Hardline positions and veto threats from permanent members have complicated and, in some cases, blocked timely renewals.”

The case of Lebanon offers a pointed illustration: despite repeated violations of the 2024 ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon, the United States demanded that UNIFIL – the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, which has been deployed since 1978 – be wound up during mandate renewal negotiations in August 2025.

A compromise was eventually reached, with the Security Council voting to renew UNIFIL for a final time until December 2026.

In Haiti, where gang violence has rendered large parts of the capital Port-au-Prince ungovernable, the Security Council authorized the deployment of an expanded Gang Suppression Force drawn from an ad hoc coalition of states, alongside a new UN Support Office to provide logistical and operational backing.

The arrangement emerged after a US-backed effort in 2024 to convert the existing Multinational Security Support Mission into a fully UN-led and UN-funded peacekeeping operation was blocked primarily by China and Russia in the Security Council.

Regional alternatives struggle to fill the gap

No new UN-led peacekeeping operation has been mandated since 2014. Regional organizations, including the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), have stepped in to plug gaps in some theatres.

But 2025 made plain that these bodies face many of the same structural problems as the UN: underfunding, deadlocked decision-making and geopolitical rivalries that prevent coherent responses to crises. Neither Sudan nor Ukraine, two of the most consequential conflicts of recent years, has seen effective multilateral peacekeeping intervention.

“Regional organizations lack key capabilities when it comes to successful, integrated peacebuilding, while they are also plagued by funding shortfalls and inability to reach agreement like the UN,” said Claudia Pfeifer Cruz, senior researcher in the SIPRI Peace Operations and Conflict Management Programme.

“As UN-led conflict management recedes, it is leaving a growing gap that alternative models are unable to fill.”

Global South carries the operational burden

One aspect of the data that will be of particular interest to Indian readers: all ten of the top contributors of military personnel to multilateral peace operations in 2025 were from the Global South.

Uganda topped the list for the first time, followed by Nepal, Bangladesh and India.

The remaining six were drawn from sub-Saharan Africa – Rwanda, Ethiopia, Burundi and Kenya and from Asia and Oceania, namely Pakistan and Indonesia.

India has been among the largest contributors of troops and police to UN peacekeeping since the 1950s, with more than 275,000 personnel having served in missions across the decades.

The continued dominance of Global South nations in troop contribution, at a time when wealthy Western donor states are cutting financial support, has sharpened long-standing arguments about who bears the costs and who bears the risks of international peace operations.

With the United States under President Donald Trump having stepped back from several international commitments and China and Russia increasingly at odds with Western-led institutions, the UN system finds itself under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously.

Whether the downward trajectory in peacekeeping can be reversed will depend, in large measure, on whether major powers can agree on both who pays and who decides – a political problem that SIPRI’s numbers suggest is, for now, without a solution.