United Nations peacekeeping, bureaucracy and practice

Peacekeeping operations are a quintessential instrument of the United Nations (UN) and massive international bureaucracies, authorized by the UN Security Council and operationalized by the Department of Peace Operations in New York. This chapter explores the ways in which missions have been operationalized by the UN and put into practice. It outlines how UN peacekeeping operations function as international organizations and bureaucracies and describes the top-level stages of composing a mission. It then reveals how peacekeeping is implemented on the ground, providing key facts and findings to illustrate the scale and scope of this form of global governance. It reviews how peacekeeping has evolved from traditional missions that monitored simple ceasefires into large multidimensional missions. It also discusses how regional organizations ‘do peacekeeping’ alongside the UN. Finally, it reflects on the challenges faced by the Department of Peace Operations, such as the increase in special political missions, decline in large multidimensional missions and rise of multipolar competition in the Security Council. Notwithstanding these challenges, peacekeeping remains a key tool of the UN for promoting international peace and security.