Towards a full spectrum of UN peace operations
Getting back on track
Lire en français ici (via Observatoire Boutros-Ghali)
Three weeks ago, I wrote about the High-level Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) and how the process undertaken in 2015 should inform the ongoing UN80 and peace operations review. Today, I want to shift from process to substance, examining one of the four essential shifts recommended by the HIPPO—that the full spectrum of United Nations peace operations must be used more flexibly to respond to changing needs on the ground. The HIPPO pointed out that
Disputes about bureaucratic boundaries, the limits of budgets and definitional debates have slowly eclipsed the true purpose of the enterprise: to provide the most relevant and appropriately configured peace operations to help prevent and resolve armed conflicts and sustain peace. …Terms such as “special political missions” and “peacekeeping operations” are ingrained in mindsets and the bureaucracy of the United Nations, but should not constrain the Organization’s ability to respond more flexibly to the needs on the ground.
Yet ten years later, the divide between peacekeeping operations and special political missions is even more entrenched than before. Why is the enduring divide a problem and what can be done about it?
Why this matters
The current bifurcation between peacekeeping operations and special political missions has very real, very practical problems.
Funding for start-up and expansion: Large peacekeeping missions can tap up to $100 million in cash from the Peacekeeping Reserve Fund for mission start-up or expansion to be able to respond even before the General Assembly adopts a new or revised budget.1 Special political missions, on the other hand, are limited $10 million in commitment authority under the unforeseen and extraordinary expenses mechanism. As this commitment authority does not come with cash, use of this mechanism exacerbates the already constrained liquidity situation in the regular budget whenever it is used.
Mission capabilities: Special political missions today don’t generally have capabilities such as joint operations centres and joint mission analysis cells, and they do not have uniformed contingents other than guard units.2 Special political mission budgets don’t include funding for programmatic activities or quick impact projects even when they could be useful for mandate implementation.3
Asset disposal during liquidation: Asset disposal is a major undertaking during mission closure. When peacekeeping missions close, they can redeploy assets to other missions or Secretariat activities funded through assessed contributions.4 When special political missions close, assets can only be transferred to other Secretariat entities at fair market value, which disincentivizes other entities from accepting those assets given the associated costs.
Headquarters support: The support account is a dedicated source of funding for capacities at Headquarters to backstop peacekeeping operations. Special political missions do not have a similar resource. The fact that the General Assembly has yet to take action on the 2011 report of the Secretary-General on backstopping arrangements for special political missions means that the Secretariat has been forced to make ad hoc arrangements to meet backstopping requirements.
Not all of these distinctions are the result of Member State decisions. When it comes to the different capabilities available in missions, the disparities between peacekeeping operations and special political missions are distinctions developed over time by various Secretariat departments to artificially differentiate special political missions from peacekeeping operations to serve their own interests.
Myths and typologies
The current division between peacekeeping operations and special political missions originated in operational requirements. When the UN was originally established, it had a single programme budget (the “regular budget”) to cover the full range of activities undertaken by the Secretariat. But beginning with the UN Emergency Force in 1956, the UN created special accounts separate from the regular budget for large-scale peacekeeping missions due to the scale and complexity of their activities compared to the rest of the activities of the Secretariat. Smaller-scale missions continued to be funded through the regular budget. By the end of the Cold War, the term “special political mission” became the term used for the non-peacekeeping political, peace, and security activities funded through the regular budget.
Other considerations began to be layered into the conventional understanding of peacekeeping operations and special political missions, creating political and bureaucratic incentives to push for missions to be established as one type or the other for reasons unrelated to the operational requirements of a mission. Over time, these considerations developed into widely-believed myths that shade the conventional wisdom of what distinguishes peacekeeping operations from special political missions.
Scale of assessments: Today, it is incorrectly assumed that peacekeeping operations have to be assessed under the peacekeeping scale of assessments. In fact, the costs of two peacekeeping missions are currently included in the regular budget and are therefore assessed using the regular budget scale. But even the expenses of special accounts separate from the regular budget do not have to be assessed under the peacekeeping scale of assessments. After all, the expenses of the UN Interim Force in Cyprus were funded through voluntary contributions until 1993.5 And when expenses are to be met through assessed contributions, the General Assembly decides what scale of assessments to apply.
Lead department: Although the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) is the lead department of all current special political missions and the Department of Peace Operations (DPO) is the lead department for all current peacekeeping operations, the General Assembly did not designate DPPA and DPO as the automatic lead department for special political missions and peacekeeping operations, respectively, when those departments were created. From the time Kofi Annan introduced the lead department arrangement, missions were assigned based on operational needs. That is why several large and complex special political missions—such as those in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Timor-Leste—were assigned to the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO, the predecessor of DPO).6
The emergence and persistence of these myths means that what was originally just a different approach to reflecting resource requirements in budgets is now a fault line that demarcates two entirely different regimes with different approaches to planning, mandating, budgeting, financing, staffing, management, and reporting to Headquarters for missions implementing an overlapping set of mandates and deployed in similar contexts. These distinctions are not only reinforced by competing Secretariat structures, but also by parallel intergovernmental processes.
The HIPPO proposed to solve these problems by eliminating the fundamental budgetary distinctions between special political missions and peacekeeping operations through the creation of a single peace operations account, separate from the regular budget, covering all missions and their associated backstopping requirements at Headquarters. This idea was doomed from the start, as it failed to take intergovernmental political into account. With all peace operations combined into a single special account, the same scale of assessments would have to apply to all missions, and—depending on whether the peacekeeping scale or the regular budget scale was applied—either the permanent members of the Security Council or developing countries would end up paying more than under the status quo.
A pragmatic way forward
To avoid the mistake made by the HIPPO, Member States should consider several pragmatic measures and to get at the fundamental basis for what has become a counterproductive differentiation between peacekeeping operations and special political missions, including:
Creating special accounts for all large field-based missions—both peacekeeping and large political missions—and allowing all missions funded through special to tap into the Peacekeeping Reserve Fund for mission start-up and expansion and to have access to the same liquidity management measures.
Applying the regular budget scale of assessments to the special accounts of existing special political missions so that Member States do not have to pay more (or less) as a result of moving the missions out of the regular budget. To avoid contentious discussions in the future about which scale of assessments to apply for a future mission, Member States could take an objective approach based on whether the General Assembly or Security Council established that mission. Given that the permanent members of the Security Council are responsible for a larger share of expenses under the current peacekeeping scale of assessments, the peacekeeping scale should be applied to the special accounts of any new mission mandated by the Security Council, while the regular budget scale should be applied to any new mission mandated by the General Assembly.
These measures would give missions access to the resources based on their operational requirements rather than on how they are financed or which is their lead department. It would make sense to do some renaming, e.g., of the Peacekeeping Reserve Fund and the peacekeeping scale of assessments, if these measures were agreed by the General Assembly.
Final thoughts
Form should follow function, not financing method. By maintaining arbitrary distinctions between peacekeeping operations and special political missions, the UN has not only limited the range of tools available to the UN in the management and resolution of conflicts, but has hamstrung special political missions by denying them capabilities and resources for mandate implementation while also exacerbating long-simmering departmental rivalries.
If the UN is to be able to think beyond its current templated toolkit to be able to come up with new, tailored approaches to deal with new and emerging threats to peace and security, it needs to move beyond its current conception of peace operations as a black-and-white choice between two narrowly-defined options towards a much more tailored approach to addressing the needs of specific contexts. This doesn't mean ignoring political realities—Member States will always care about what any changes mean in terms of their financial contributions. But with some targeted measures, the UN can finally be able to draw from the full spectrum of peace operations in a manner that does not affect how much any individual Member State will have to pay. The result? Faster deployments. Better liquidity management. Smoother transitions and easier mission liquidations. And, most importantly, a better chance of success in some of the world’s toughest conflict zones.
© 2025 Eugene Chen under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
UN financial regulation 4.6.
When special political missions require such capacities, they are usually given different names, such as the Joint Analysis and Reporting Section in UNAMA.
Whether UNITAMS should have access to programmatic funding was a point of contention at Headquarters when the mission was established. In the end, an allocation of $1 million was included in the initial mission budget. This funding was removed in subsequent budgets at the insistence of DPPA, which argued that the funding was needed only in the first year to facilitate the transition from UNAMID.
UN financial regulation 5.14.
General Assembly resolution 47/236 of 14 September 1993.
United Nations, “Report of the Office of Internal Oversight Services on the Audit of the Management of Special Political Missions by the Department of Political Affairs (A/61/357),” September 19, 2006, https://undocs.org/en/A/61/357.