On June 16, 2023, Mali’s foreign minister Abdoulaye Diop stunned the United Nations Security Council when he asked for the ‘withdrawal, without delay’ of the decade old United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA). Although successive Malian governments had asked the UN to do more to fight armed groups and relations between the Malian transitional government and the UN mission had deteriorated since the August 2020 military takeover in Mali (notably over UN human rights reporting), the timing of the demand still caught many by surprise. But the Council settled on an unprecedently short 6-month timeline for an operation that size to leave.
In my book, The UN Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA): Peacekeeping Caught in the Geopolitical Crossfire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), I demonstrate how peacekeeping has become a field of confrontation between major and middle powers, and how these power rivalries are beginning to have negative consequences affecting UN peace operations. It is not possible to understand recent (as well as historical) developments in UN peace operations without factoring the evolution of these power rivalries. I therefore offer a new ‘realist-constructivist’ approach that aims to challenge the dominant Western liberal paradigm when it comes to the study of UN peace operations.
What does the end of MINUSMA tell us about the state of peace operations?
The departure of blue helmets precipitated the resumption of fighting as the Malian government did not want MINUSMA camps to fall into the hands of armed groups. Peacekeepers in turn accelerated their escape for fear of becoming caught in the crossfire and were forced to abandon equipment (and to destroy some of it). It took 800 of them eight days to travel 350 kilometers from Kidal city to Gao in a convoy of more than 140 vehicles, traveling without air surveillance because of restrictions imposed by the host country. Malian forces together with their allies from Russian Wagner Group eventually entered the rebel stronghold of Kidal after having carried out a series of TB2 drone strikes. Soon after the official closing of MINUSMA, the Malian transition government denounced the 2015 peace agreement and declared its “immediate termination” at the end of January 2024.
In a changing global order, MINUSMA has in many ways been the most interesting laboratory of contemporary UN peace operations. It was one of the largest ‘stabilization’ missions (with an annual budget of $1.2bn), with significant European and Chinese contingents working with a majority of African peacekeepers, operating in parallel to a French force in an environment affected by terrorism. Despite demonstrating a certain ability to adapt to the threat, it has been the deadliest UN mission with 311 peacekeepers killed and more than 700 injured. MINUSMA ultimately became the collateral damage of new geopolitical rivalries heightened by the growing influence of Russia on the African continent—supported by deployments of Wagner Group and Russian instructors—and the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
UN peace operations have taken many forms over the past 75 years, some modest in size and mandate, others far more ambitious and multidimensional, and have been the most visible activity of the world organization. They have adapted and been shaped by changes in the international order in which they have operated, but their future is now called into question under the current geopolitical context and member state divisions. The return of president Donald Trump to the White House risk further exacerbating some of these dynamics and is already bringing back bad memories in Turtle Bay, including of slashing US contributions to the UN peacekeeping budget.
Is MINUSMA the “canary in the coal mine” for international cooperation?
An informed and analytical story of the UN multidimensional stabilization operation in Mali is essential as different actors, including former heads of mission and negotiators in Mali, started writing about their experiences. The UN is doing its own lessons learning on different aspects of its engagement in Mali, and the government of Mali is keen to share its own narrative. MINUSMA is part of a bigger story, that of a major turning point for UN peacekeeping and notably its large multidimensional stabilization missions in Africa. And peacekeeping is an important vehicle through which member states have practiced multilateralism and is in some ways a “canary in the coal mine” for international cooperation.
Peacekeeping is witnessing the end of three decades of expansion made possible by the post-Cold War international liberal order and the adaptation and complexification of the peacekeeping tool to deal with civil wars. UN peace operations had been largely consensual and shielded from Security Council divisions. The US, France, and the UK on one side (the “P3”) and Russia and China on the other side (the “P2”) have been divided over issues such as the NATO bombing campaign that toppled Gaddafi in 2011, the conflict in Syria and the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Until recently, members of the Council had demonstrated a unique ability to “compartmentalize” their differences and thus maintain a common front on the deployment of operations. But peace operations have now also become a field of confrontation, albeit mostly indirect, between major and middle powers in a context of the ‘crisis of multilateralism’ and contestation of the ‘liberal order’ perceived by a growing number of member states as a Western-dominated order.
How do these growing power rivalries affect peace operations?
Over the past decade and particularly since 2018, power rivalries started negatively impacting the course of peace operations more directly and risk making these operations less impartial, less legitimate, and less relevant. In New York, these rivalries play out at the Security Council, the General Assembly but also the United Nations Secretariat (the bureaucracy), through the negotiations of resolutions and declarations, budgets, but also around values and norms, as well as in increasingly politicized senior UN appointments. In field operations, power games manifest through troop contributions, the growing assertiveness of host countries, and various ‘parallel forces’ – such as French military forces and the Russian Wagner Group in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali, but also increasingly bilateral forces and ad hoc coalitions representing alternative security offers to UN peacekeepers. While this member state influence if often more indirect in the field, which theoretically gives greater maneuver room for UN operations, conflicting interests of different key powers can become more direct and obstruct the work of a peace operation, as it became the case in Mali, but also CAR, Libya, and Syria.
Like many other UN and peacekeeping ‘experts,’ my work had (and notably during my years at the International Peace Institute in New York till the end of 2017) mainly focused on practical or ‘micro’ policy questions aimed at improving the functioning of the UN, and particularly its peace operations, without really making the link with debates at a more ‘macro’ level, to use the terminology of Roland Paris. The book aims to contribute to the rapprochement between peace operations and international relations others, such as Kseniya Oksamytna and John Karlsrud have ably initiated. It promotes an original realist-constructivist analytical framework, as an alternative to the dominant liberal approach when it comes to the study of UN peacekeeping. While the study of peace operations cannot of course be reduced to that of geostrategic rivalries, my book demonstrates that one cannot understand developments in UN peace operations without better factoring in these complex power rivalries and their rapid evolutions.
What does that mean for the future of UN peace operations?
The future of UN peace operations is called into question by these power rivalries exacerbated by the growing importance of China at the UN and the China-US rivalry, Russia’s growing influence on the African continent, and the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East. Current rivalries will likely continue to constrain UN operations, and risk undermining their impartiality and relevance. But a bigger risk would be that great and middle powers disengage durably from peace operations that they would see as neither delivering on the ground, nor really serving their interests. There is however no fatalism in this. Multilateralism is compatible with the exercise of power, but member states need to continue seeing value in its tools.
As the UN contemplates new models for UN peacekeeping, rather than try to shelter itself and risk irrelevance, the UN Secretariat should embrace power rivalries and better consider power dynamics at headquarters and in field operations, including when considering potential new operations, without resigning itself to them. For their part, member states would be mistaken to neglect multilateralism and focus exclusively on non-UN bilateral and ad hoc peace enforcement arrangements. Today’s world of hardened international relations requires diversified strategies of cooperation, power, and influence, for which UN peace operations remain a useful vehicle.
About the author:
J. Arthur Boutellis is a Non-Resident Senior Adviser at the International Peace Institute (IPI) and teaches at graduate-level at Columbia University and Sciences Po Paris. He has worked with the United Nations in New York, West Bank & Gaza, Burundi, Chad and the Central African Republic, Haiti and Mali.
This think-piece is based on the author’s recent book The UN Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA): Peacekeeping Caught in the Geopolitical Crossfire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
Photo credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino