What now for Security Council resolution 2719?

Full of sound and fury

On Tuesday, 30 September, the Security Council adopted resolution 2793 authorizing the rehatting of the Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission in Haiti into the Gang Suppression Force, to be supported by a new UN Support Office for Haiti (UNSOH) funded through assessed contributions. I remain highly skeptical that the rebranding of the MSS and the creation of a standalone UNSOH are what will bring Haiti out of its current spiral into instability and insecurity, for reasons covered in a previous column. The issue is not whether the UN has the ability to deliver operational support to a non-UN force. Rather, it is the fact that experience has shown that a securitized response—in essence, the “primacy of the military”—is more likely to exacerbate the social, political, and economic risk factors driving the violence than to help pave a path towards peace, especially when it is not deployed in support of a credible political strategy.

But this week’s column is not about Haiti. It’s about what the adoption of resolution 2793 tells us about the operationalization of resolution 2719, the framework resolution for providing African Union-led peace support operations to have access to UN assessed contributions adopted in December 2023. If nothing else, the adoption of this resolution reinforces the simple fact that the permanent members of the Security Council have always been able to authorize the use of UN assessed contributions in support of non-UN forces whenever they wanted to, regardless of whether the requisite mitigation, compliance, and accountability measures and capabilities are in place.

Political considerations

A framework such as the one contained in resolution 2719 has never been a prerequisite for access to UN assessed contributions, and the fact that resolution 2719 was adopted doesn’t mean that the permanent members of the Security Council—especially the United States¹—would approve access to assessed contributions if the African Union follows the procedures outlined in the resolution. The Security Council would obviously be even less inclined to agree to application when the procedures are not followed.

The negotiations that resulted in the adoption of resolution 2719 were not easy and resulted in an agreement which, in classic compromise fashion, left all of the parties dissatisfied. A key element which was required to overcome U.S. opposition was an amendment to the draft resolution prior to its adoption explicitly adding a paragraph stating that “African Union-led peace support operations that are authorized by the Security Council will have access to funding from the United Nations assessed contributions not exceeding 75 per cent of their annual budgets”.²

But the November 2024 request to the Security Council for a so-called “hybrid implementation” of resolution 2719 to the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) would have had the practical effect of charging over 90% of the costs of AUSSOM to UN assessed contributions in terms of both the budget for AUSSOM itself as well as the costs of the AUSSOM support package funded through the UN Support Office for Somalia (UNSOS).³ This was decidedly not what was agreed under the 2719 framework. The ham-fisted manner in which the African Union Commission invoked the 2719 framework while violating its provisions not only failed to secure additional assessed contributions for AUSSOM but likely harmed the chances of the Security Council being willing to consider requests under the 2719 framework in the future.

Of course, an elephant in the room is the worsening liquidity situation in the Secretariat.⁴ The Trump administration has cancelled funding for appropriations for UN peacekeeping and UN support to AUSSOM alike through the August pocket rescission package and has zeroed out funding for U.S. assessed contributions to the UN in the U.S. federal budget request for fiscal year 2026. Missions are already reaching the limit of what they can do to manage liquidity through the deferral of reimbursements to troop- and police-contributing countries, cross-borrowing between mission accounts, and drawing upon the Peacekeeping Reserve Fund. The drawdown and closure of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon and the associated decrease in its budget will further exacerbate the cash shortfall and significantly reduce the likelihood of the Security Council approving the application of 2719 in the near term.

Shortcomings of the 2719 framework

The failure to apply the 2719 framework to Somalia (or any other context) and the liquidity crisis provide a collective opportunity to step back, objectively assess the efficacy of the 2719 framework, and think about alternatives. As I have previously argued, resolution 2719 is most useful as symbolic representation of how far the UN-African Union partnership has developed but not useful as a practical mechanism for partnership, for several reasons. It:

1. Undermines African Union ownership of peace support operations and the comparative advantage claimed by the African Union “in responding rapidly to some of the most complex and challenging crises in Africa” through UN administrative control;

2. Undermines the role of the UN in the maintenance of international peace and security by relegating its function to that of an operational service provider;

3. Fails to address requirements for UN support to regional forces and ad hoc coalitions not led by the African Union (which are far more common today than African Union-led missions); and

4. Fails to address the persistent lacuna in African Union Commission capacity for the planning, management, and financing of its own peace support operations, despite decades of support from partner countries and organizations, including the European Union and the UN.

Despite all of these fundamental problems with the 2719 framework, the African Union Commission and the UN Secretariat have vested interests in keeping the framework alive that are unrelated to ensuring the effectiveness of conflict resolution. It allows the Commission to shirk responsibility for financing and to avoid confronting the fundamental problem of insufficient political and financial support forthcoming from African Union member states for African Union-led peace support operations. And it provides Secretariat entities a justification to request additional resources—or defend existing ones—during a period of belt-tightening. In June, the General Assembly approved the establishment of six of the ten positions requested by four separate entities to support implementation of resolution 2719.⁵

The prioritization of the support office model over the other modalities outlined in the 2023 report of the Secretary-General also makes the framework a front in the internal turf wars of the Secretariat. As I pointed out in August, a key obstacle to moving towards a full spectrum of peace operations is the fact that different entities are the lead department for different types of peace operations, therefore creating bureaucratic incentives for the pursuit of the various options for a UN presence. While the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) is currently the lead department for special political missions and the Department of Peace Operations (DPO) is currently the lead department for peacekeeping operations,⁶ the Department of Operational Support (DOS) is the lead department for standalone support offices.

And at the field level, the fact that support offices are entities unto themselves with direct delegated authority from the Secretary-General creates further structural obstacles to realizing the primacy of politics. This is because support offices are, first and foremost, more concerned with the provision of support to clients rather than with using a support package as a strategic enabler for both the political efforts of the UN special representative as well as for enhancing coherence between the various actors present on the ground.

Moving forward

We need to start thinking outside of the support office model as the only option for operationalizing the UN partnership with the African Union, other regional organizations, and ad hoc coalitions. The adoption of resolution 2719 does not preclude the possibility of other options for joint planning, authorization, or funding. These could include:

• Delivery of support packages to non-UN forces through an existing UN peace operation rather than a standalone support office;

• Establishment of missions with a dual reporting line to the UN Security Council and the African Union Peace and Security Council (or relevant subregional body), similar to the “joint mission” approach presented in the aforementioned report of the Secretary-General;⁷ and

• Division-of-responsibility arrangements in which portions of a broader Security Council mandate are delegated by the UN to the African Union or subregional configuration to implement as part of a broader strategy in something akin to an “implementing partner” arrangement.⁸

But these are not just partnership modalities or financing arrangements. These need to be understood as part of the broader UN toolkit for the maintenance of international peace and security and therefore need to be part of the ongoing peace operations review. Since its inception, the insular approach taken by the Secretariat to the review, including the fact that it is being jointly led by DPPA and DPO, has significantly limited the likelihood that the review would yield analysis and recommendations of the requisite degree of introspection and innovation. But at the very least, drawing in other relevant entities, such as DOS, and expanding the scope to include UN engagement and support with non-UN forces should be pursued to ensure that the end result is as relevant as possible, even if an internal review will not be able to fully escape the departmental siloes and approaches that contributed to bring us to the current state of affairs.

© 2025 Eugene Chen under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

1. Recall that an earlier attempt to adopt a framework resolution failed in 2018 due to the threat of a veto during the first Trump term. Republicans in Congress have also been consistent in their opposition to providing African Union peace support operations with assessed contributions in recent years.

2. United Nations Security Council (2023). United States of America: amendment to the draft resolution contained in document S/2023/999 (S/2023/1023). https://undocs.org/en/S/2023/1023

3. United Nations (2024, December 27). Adopting Resolution 2767 (2024), Security Council Endorses New African Union Support Mission in Somalia [Meetings coverage]. https://press.un.org/en/2024/sc15955.doc.htm

4. This, of course, also affects the rehatting of the MSS and establishment of UNSOH.

5. United Nations General Assembly (2025). Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 30 June 2025: Support account for peacekeeping operations (79/298). https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/79/298

6. This is a de facto arrangement, not a de jure arrangement. In the past, the designation of dead department was based on operational requirements rather than on mission type/funding source, and therefore the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (the predecessor of DPO) served as the lead department for several special political missions.

7. United Nations (2023). Implementation of Security Council resolutions 2320 (2016) and 2378 (2017) and considerations related to the financing of African Union peace support operations mandated by the Security Council (S/2023/303), 11. https://undocs.org/en/S/2023/303

8. Chen, E. (2024). A New Vision for Peace Operations (Or how I learned to stop worrying and love Christmas tree mandates), 39-40. NYU Center on International Cooperation. https://cic.nyu.edu/resources/a-new-vision-for-peace-operations/