UN transitions in a changed geopolitical context

More lessons not learned

UN transitions have been a hot topic in peace operations circles in recent years. In practical terms, UN transitions are processes involving the reconfiguration of the overall UN presence in a particular country involving either the establishment and expansion or drawdown and closure of a UN peace operation. They are moments of significant change in the relationships between the UN and local stakeholders, and they present both risks and opportunities for countries to relapse into conflict or find a trajectory towards sustainable peace.

Such processes are seldom smooth and are marked by recurring challenges and problems, including those presented in a 2022 report of the Secretary-General. The increasingly challenging contexts surrounding UN transitions only makes it more urgent that member states and the Secretariat finally take meaningful action to address these long-standing issues, including by shifting away from mission-centric approaches and by adjusting administrative and budgetary policies and processes, to maximize limited resources and safeguard hard-won gains in sustaining peace.

Background

Ireland championed the issue during its term as an elected member of the Security Council (2021-2022) and spearheaded the adoption of resolution 2594 (2021), which described transitions as:

a strategic process which builds towards a reconfiguration of the strategy, footprint, and capacity of the United Nations in a way that supports peacebuilding objectives and the development of a sustainable peace, in a manner that supports and reinforces national ownership, informed by the operational context and the national priorities and needs of the host State and its population, and that includes engagement with local community and civil society, and, where relevant, regional and sub-regional organisations, and other relevant stakeholders, with the full, equal and meaningful participation of women and the inclusion of youth and persons with disabilities[.]

This description, along with most of the existing policy and practice at the UN on transitions, assumes transitions in the context of achieving some degree of stability and progress in the implementation of a political process. But since the adoption of resolution 2594, there have been a spate of transitions promoted by requests for the closure of missions by both host governments and the Security Council. These include missions that closed in Mali (June 2023) and Iraq (December 2025), upcoming mission closures in Hudeidah (March 2026), Somalia (October 2026), and Lebanon (December 2026), and an extended drawdown process in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

UN transitions despite persistent fragility, conflict, and violence, should be understood as the new normal, reinforced by the fact that neither the United States nor host governments with authoritarian tendencies are interested in peacebuilding and the development of pluralist societies underpinned by democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.¹ But existing approaches to transitions at the UN, and the insistence that transitions be based on conditions and benchmarks, remain based on the assumption that transitions take place in situations of relative stability and involve a fairly straightforward linear hand-off between one peace operation to a smaller peace operation or to the UN country team. This needs to change.

The need for a systems approach to transitions

Entrenched mindsets complicate transitions. In the Secretariat staff often speak primarily in terms of mission withdrawal rather than of UN transitions. This is not merely a matter of semantics; the use of “transitions” as a euphemism for “withdrawal” instead of recognizing that the latter is but an element of the former reveals a persistent mission-centric mindset around transitions.² This is not entirely surprising, given that much of the decision-making is driven by Secretariat departments, the Security Council, and member state experts all focused on missions rather than on the broader UN configuration.³

But a peace operation is but one part of the overall UN presence in a country. The agencies, funds, and programmes of the UN country team are present in a country before a mission is deployed and remain after a mission departs. It’s easy for stakeholders in New York to ignore post-mandate considerations and consequences when countries fall off the Security Council agenda and when backstopping posts at Headquarters are abolished upon mission closure. But this means that the concerns, perspectives, mandates, and priorities of the UN country team are often overlooked and ignored, with lasting consequences.

The fact is that UN country teams have different expertise and capabilities from peace operations, as well as different interlocutors in host state authorities. Take, for example, the protection of civilians. Over the past 15 years, peacekeeping operations have emphasized physical protection at the expense of other aspects of the protection of civilians mandate. The emphasis by the Secretariat and Security Council on finding ways for the UN to ensure physical protection after the departure of a peacekeeping mission is problematic because it saddles the UN country team with peacekeeping-specific expectations and responsibilities. And it fails to recognize that other parts of the UN system have different approaches to protection that align with their mandates, capabilities, and expertise.

Forcing residual tasks and legacies of peacekeeping onto the country team not only drives tension between missions and country teams, but can undermine the ability of agencies, funds, and programmes to effectively implement their own activities. The Secretariat and member states must do a better job of viewing post-mandate requirements from the perspective of those who have to deliver on them.⁴

Administrative and budgetary issues

Much of this mismatch between tools and expectations applies also in situations in which a peacekeeping mission is being replaced with a special political mission. Here, there are additional complications from the fact that different administrative and budgetary policies and procedures apply to peacekeeping operations and special political missions, including during start-up and closure. This, plus the fact that there are different lead departments and no joint planning capacity at Headquarters, also causes the Secretariat to treat liquidation and start-up as two separate and parallel processes, rather than an integrated transition. This results in a tremendous amount of inefficiency, such as discontinuity in staffing and contract management during the handover and unnecessary procurement of considerable amounts of goods and services in the new mission. The General Assembly should address the discrepancies in the financial regulations and rules on how the different types of peace operations are managed, and the Secretariat should take steps to align how missions are budgeted and to better allow adjustments in the face of changing requirements and circumstances.

It’s not enough to say that missions need to have exit strategies in mind from the start or that they should engage in early transition planning; missions must be given the space and resources to actually do that planning. As I’ve previously noted, there is no culture of planning at the UN, and in fact contingency planning is often actively suppressed by the Secretary-General and discouraged by certain member states out of fear that such planning implies that the UN expects or endorses a certain outcome.

Contingency planning, including for transitions, needs to become so routine as to be unremarkable. And instead of the existing siloed approaches to planning and executing mission closure and start-up, efficient and effective transitions therefore require integrated teams, which not only include capacity and expertise from across missions and the UN country team, but are reinforced with specialized expertise and capacity from outside the mission. This is also important given that the nature of substantive and support tasks during UN transitions are fundamentally different in character, nature, and scale than during mandate implementation.

Final thoughts

Challenges with the drawdown and closure of existing missions—especially large multidimensional peacekeeping operations—stem from the manner in which those missions were originally established. The emphasis on deployment of uniformed personnel and decisions on acquisition and construction without regard to post-mandate considerations all have implications for the working relationship between missions and country teams. The integration agenda, including the integrated assessment and planning policy, was intended to address the problems. But in most cases implementation is approached more as a box-checking exercise. Integration currently only exists on paper instead of in practice unless there is constellation of people in place who are committed to making it work.

A modular approach to mandate implementation (or what the Secretary-General has described as “networked multidimensional operations”⁵) can be a way to address the recurring problems experienced during UN transitions. It would allow a distribution of tasks across the UN system on the basis of comparative advantage, take into account the longer time horizon required for peacebuilding activities, and help ensure programmatic continuity and the maintenance of institutional memory after the departure of a peace operation, especially if that departure is accelerated. That said, retrofitting an existing mission to such an approach would run into real bureaucratic and cultural challenges given the structural incentives present to maintain existing arrangements. It would be much easier to implement this for a new mission, and therefore the Secretariat and member states should strongly consider a networked approach for any potential follow-on mission to a closing peacekeeping operation.

© 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.

1. Chen, E. (2026). So long, farewell: Stabilisation and the exit of UN peacekeeping operations. The British Academy. https://doi.org/10.5871/global-disorder/9780856727207

2. We also see this in the fact that mission-centric strategic reviews have entirely supplanted system-wide strategic assessments, despite the requirements of the UN integrated assessment and planning policy. This too has direct implications for transition planning.

3. This piece focuses on lack of coherence in transition planning within the UN system, but another major problem that must not be overlooked is the absence of effective consultation and coordination with local stakeholders during transition processes. See, for example, Danielak, S. (2025). Post-military Futures: Plans and Failure of the Peace Operations’ Infrastructure Handover in Darfur. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 19(5), 567–585. https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2025.2480153

4. Although providing the country team with additional peace and security capacity and expertise may help, this needs to be carefully managed, particularly if the relationship between the UN and the host government is strained. The experience of Nepal is a case in point. A political liaison office was established following the 2011 closure of the UN Mission in Nepal to provide some degree of capacity to monitor progress in the implementation of the peace process, but the activities of the office created tensions between the UN country team and the government, leading the government to demand the closure of the liaison office in 2018.

5. United Nations. (2025). UN80 Initiative Workstream 3: Changing structures and realigning programmes—Shifting paradigms: United to deliver: Report of the Secretary-General (A/80/392). https://undocs.org/en/A/80/392