Who pays for UN peacekeeping?

Largely funded by developed nations but mostly manned by personnel from developing countries, U.N. peacekeeping operations today reflect the altered dynamics that are challenging the burden-sharing that the United Nations itself touts as a strength of such missions. Reports about peacekeepers’ sexual abuse of civilians, especially young children, have already led ordinary citizens to have misgivings about the ability, let alone the right, of troops to carry out the responsibility of stemming global conflict. But the reasons that some peacekeepers may be unfit for such an important task, in many cases, are even more immediate: The imbalance in the division of labor in peacekeeping raises questions on whether troops assigned to conflict zones can protect the civilians they’re supposed to shield from danger in the first place. Impartiality is one of the three basic principles that guide U.N. peacekeeping. And yet, “all peace operations are political.” Ian Martin, former special representative of the U.N. secretary-general in Nepal, wrote that in 2010; Jim Della-Giacoma, deputy director and head of the crisis diplomacy and peace operations program at the Center on International Cooperation, repeated it in an essay published last June. Earlier this year, attacks by the al-Qaida’s North African arm against the U.N. Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization’s convoy in Mali, which killed six peacekeepers and wounded five others — all from Burkina Faso — only drove home that point. They also highlighted the volatile contexts that peacekeepers find themselves in, whether or not they’re equipped or trained to handle them. It is a reality that, Della-Giacoma acknowledged, has become even more apparent since the 2003 bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq, by the militant jihadist group known as Jama'at al-Tawhid wa'l Jihad, some of whose members are now part of the Islamic State group. Recognizing the threats present in peacekeeping missions and the weaknesses of peacekeepers in managing insecure environments, a June 2015 report of the 17-member high-level independent panel convened by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted that “due to their composition and character, [U.N. peacekeeping missions] are not suited to engage in military counterterrorism operations. They lack the specific equipment, intelligence, logistics, capabilities and specialized military preparation required, among other aspects.” The lack of direct support from developed countries will only reinforce the problems and patterns underlying the asymmetrical distribution of peacekeeping responsibilities. At an American Enterprise Institute event last November, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Samantha Power called the current situation “unsustainable and unfair.” “It will not produce the peacekeeping forces that today’s conflicts and our national security demand,” she said in her remarks. “And it perpetuates divisions between the two camps [developed countries and developing countries], when in reality we have a shared interest in seeing peacekeeping succeed.” Behind the UN peacekeeping ‘budget’ The United Nations doesn’t have a unified peacekeeping budget, Katharina Coleman, associate professor at the University of British Columbia, pointed out in her May 2014 paper for the International Peace Institute on how to incentivize effective participation in U.N. peacekeeping. Instead, the General Assembly approves individual annual budgets for the most active U.N. peace operations, the U.N. Logistics Base, the U.N. support account for peacekeeping operations and, since 2009, the U.N. Support Office for the African Union Mission in Somalia. The combined costs of these operations make up what is often summarily referred to as the U.N. peacekeeping budget for the financial year covering July 1 to June 30. In accordance with the provisions of Article 17 of the U.N. Charter, U.N. member states are legally obligated to pay their share to fund peacekeeping operations. The respective amounts, which are determined by what according to the United Nations is a “complex formula” that broadly considers, among several factors, member states’ gross national incomes, are apportioned based on a scale of assessments that member states themselves have calibrated. “There are significant debates about the scales and around U.N. financing of peacekeeping operations, more generally … but the basic principle of apportioning U.N. costs among member states is enshrined in the charter, and negotiations about exactly how these costs are to be apportioned are shaped — and to some extent anchored — by what was agreed to in earlier rounds,” Coleman told Devex. In 2013-15, the scale ranged from 0.0001 percent for several African countries and Pacific island nations to at least 28 percent for the United States, which has always had the highest assessed contribution rate. With the exception of China — which has the sixth-highest assessed rate, at 6.64 percent, and continues to see its share of assessed peacekeeping contributions increase — the list of the top providers of assessed contributions leans primarily toward developed countries. Member states can also make voluntary contributions — in the form of supplies, transportation and personnel and financial contributions beyond their assessed share of peacekeeping costs — to peacekeeping operations, but such additional resources, while invaluable, continue to account for a small portion of peacekeeping expenses, according to Coleman. For example, in fiscal 2013-14, budgeted voluntary resources amounted to $6.4 million, or a mere 0.08 percent of peacekeeping missions’ financial requirements. While mandatory, paying for peacekeeping hasn’t exactly garnered strict compliance. According to the United Nations, at the end of fiscal year 2014-15, member states owed $4.8 billion in current and past peacekeeping dues. This isn’t a recent problem: When then U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of U.N. peacekeeping troops in 1988, he lamented that member states owed $450 million in back payments — with at least $350 million outstanding from the United States — to support peacekeeping. An imbalance of powers Compared with the costs of stationing North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces, U.N. peacekeeping missions are “relatively cheap crisis management tools,” Richard Gowan, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a post for the Brookings Institution in June. Still, Gowan pointed out to Devex that some Western countries that played a major military role in U.N. missions during the Cold War, including Canada and Nordic countries, have pared back their U.N. personnel deployments and instead focused on NATO operations. “You have Western disengagement from contributing troops to U.N. peacekeeping, which began in the mid-1990s and largely persists today,” Coleman said. That the costs of peacekeeping have eclipsed pecuniary perks haven’t helped to advance the case for more peacekeeping assistance. Since 2002, the basic uniformed personnel cost reimbursement rate hasn’t budged, “making participation in U.N. peacekeeping financially less attractive for states facing rising deployment costs,” according to Coleman. Based on 2013 data in Coleman’s paper, the United States, Japan, France, Germany and the United Kingdom were the five countries with the largest assessed contributions to peacekeeping operations, but the total share of the troops coming from these countries reached just 1.91 percent of all U.N. uniformed personnel. Meanwhile, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Ethiopia and Nigeria deployed the most personnel to U.N. peacekeeping missions in the same year, with the shares of troops from these countries ranging from 4.92 percent for Nigeria to 8.42 percent for Pakistan. Taken together, U.N. uniformed personnel from these five countries constituted 36.13 percent of troops in 2013. Three of these countries have also suffered the most troop fatalities. Since 1948, when U.N. peacekeeping began with the U.N. Security Council’s authorization of the deployment of U.N. military observers to the Middle East, the U.N. has recorded 3,386 deaths, with 13 percent coming from India (159), Nigeria (145) and Pakistan (137). Of course, the incentives for developing countries to send their troops to peacekeeping missions vary widely. Gowan pointed out that for countries like Fiji and Bangladesh, “there is a financial benefit to sending troops on blue helmet missions.” While the reimbursement rate for troops and police personnel has been stagnant, U.N. payments for such contributions are still attractive to some countries. This, at least, is especially true for Fiji, whose peacekeeping personnel have practically become an export: The small island nation uses the money from peacekeeping missions to prop up its economy and to boost its military, which has had a prominent role in the politics of a country that doesn’t seem to have a need for such a bloated armed force in the first place. For African countries like Ethiopia and South Africa, peacekeeping is mainly used as a stabilizing tool in the region. Emerging powers like India and Brazil, meanwhile, wield their significant U.N. deployments partly to win permanent seats in the U.N. Security Council, according to Gowan. Still, it’s also an overstatement to claim that richer countries have abandoned peacekeeping altogether. According to Gowan, while the presence of Western troops in U.N. peacekeeping missions has significantly dwindled over the years, for some countries, such as the Netherlands, the NATO drawdown in Afghanistan has presented peacekeeping operations as an alternative option. European countries, he added, are also interested in participating in peacekeeping missions to limit conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East. “So while developing countries have done the most peacekeeping work in recent years, more advanced militaries may play a greater in trouble spots such as Mali for national security reasons in the future,” Gowan said. Setting up the right incentives The United Nations, which has an approved budget of around $8.27 billion for fiscal 2015-16, currently runs 16 peacekeeping operations around the world. But to attract the peacekeeping capabilities needed to manage today’s conflicts, U.N. peacekeeping missions need to reform the existing mechanisms that fail to encourage timely and effective contributions from countries, according to Coleman, who detailed her recommendations in her paper. “There is no financial incentive for states to invest in readiness for U.N. peacekeeping because [troop-contributing countries and police-contributing countries] are currently reimbursed only for costs arising from their participation in a particular mission,” she wrote. “Costs incurred in advance of a U.N. deployment are not reimbursable.” Coleman also noted that rate adjustments for personnel contributions themselves can be highly politicized. The top financial contributors to U.N. peacekeeping missions, mainly developed countries with fewer boots on the ground, stand to gain from maintaining low peacekeeping costs and derive little benefit from rate increases. But for the largest TCCs, which have a more visible presence in peacekeeping operations but face few of the financial costs of U.N. missions, such adjustments are unsurprisingly welcome. This month, U.S. President Barack Obama will chair a summit on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly to “help catalyze a wave of new commitments,” according to Power. It is an event that, based on what Power said in Brussels, Belgium, in March, is meant to spur greater European involvement in U.N. peacekeeping operations. Power cited the example of how “targeted, effective and momentum-shifting” European contributions to U.N. peacekeeping missions can be through an incident in the northern town of Tabankort in Mali in January. When armed rebels advanced on Tabankort and opened fire on Bangladeshi peacekeepers, the latter “held their ground, returned fire and called for helicopter support. The Dutch peacekeepers — who had arrived in Mali only weeks earlier — swiftly responded to the call, striking the rebels with an attack helicopter unit and ending the assault on the town.” Despite China’s upward share of assessed peacekeeping contributions, the United States will likely continue to be the largest backer of U.N. peacekeeping operations for the foreseeable future, Gowan said. But even it should consider its rather tepid human support for U.N. missions: In 2013, the share of total U.N. uniformed personnel from the United States was a measly 0.12 percent, the lowest proportion among the top five financial contributors to U.N. peacekeeping operations in that year. According to Gowan, several Asian, European and Latin American countries already seem to be on track to pledge fresh infantry or specialized units ahead of the summit. Raising the overall standard of U.N. peacekeeping operations, he said, is “a long-term project … one that involves both attracting more Western countries to deploy troops on U.N. missions and helping existing troop contributors to boost their forces.” But he acknowledged that U.N. peacekeeping itself is also a “flawed tool” — one that could stand to benefit from the structural reforms that Coleman suggested. “[The summit] is an important opportunity to raise the quality of contributions to U.N. missions, and Washington has seriously invested in making it a success, but some diplomats think this is a ‘legacy event’ for Obama that will have limited long-term consequences,” Gowan said. Conflict in Context is a monthlong global conversation on conflict, transition and recovery hosted by Devex in partnership with Chemonics, Cordaid, Mercy Corps , OSCE and USAID. 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