The African Union and its regional partners today run ten peacekeeping and security operations across seventeen countries, with more than seventy thousand personnel between them. Some of these missions win UN backing and support. Beyond that, a senior UN official said in 2009, AU peacekeeping depended on a small pool of donors.
more
Africa already hosts more peacekeeping than any other continent. The UN has run more than thirty missions there since 1960, and roughly half of its missions worldwide still sit on the continent. The AU and partners such as the Economic Community of West African States have layered their own operations on top of that UN presence. The two biggest are the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia and the Lake Chad Basin Commission’s Multinational Joint Task Force. More than fifty thousand troops serve in UN operations in Africa, and tens of thousands more in regional missions. In 2022, four African-led missions launched or revised their mandates. They cover the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, and Somalia.
How each council authorises a mission
A UN peacekeeping operation gets authorised when at least nine of the Security Council’s fifteen members vote for it and none of its five permanent members vetoes it. The Council must also vote to renew each mission when its mandate expires, typically every year. The African Union’s own Peace and Security Council, the body that authorises AU-led missions, draws its fifteen seats from all fifty-five member states. It has no permanent members.
When the UN pays instead
Somalia is one example of the UN stepping in. It authorised the African Union’s mission there and provided funding and logistics. That lasted until the Security Council reshaped the mission in 2022 into what is now the African Union Transition Mission. The Multinational Joint Task Force against Boko Haram and the G5 Sahel force followed a similar route. The AU authorised both, and UN Security Council backing gave their mandates more weight.
“The same small pool of donors”
In 2009, the UN’s own peacekeeping chief spelled out the funding problem. Alain Le Roy, then Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, told the Security Council that African Union peacekeeping was “entirely dependent on the same small pool of donors.” He argued that if the world asks the AU to lead the first response to a crisis, it has an obligation to help make that response credible. He pushed for money to arrive on a steadier schedule, without losing the speed needed to respond to a fast-moving crisis. The Security Council’s own presidential statement that October agreed. Read out by Vietnam’s ambassador, Le Luong Minh, it called for more “predictability, sustainability and flexibility” in how regional organisations get financed for peacekeeping under UN authorisation. The statement also said the AU needed more institutional capacity to plan, manage, and deploy its operations.
Le Roy held up two partnerships as proof it could work: the joint AU-UN force in Darfur, and UN backing for the AU’s mission in Somalia. But he did not pretend the model had no ceiling. Resource and capacity constraints, he told the Council, had “hampered the ability to fully realize the potential of this partnership.”
Outside support has shrunk
An EU counterinsurgency force led by France came under pressure to leave Mali in 2022, after a military junta took power. French-led efforts elsewhere in the Sahel have run into the same resistance. The Council on Foreign Relations reports that the EU’s role in African peacekeeping has shrunk as a result.
Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have each formally asked the UN’s own peacekeepers to leave, and both withdrawals are under way.
