Peacekeeping as a Power Projection: United States Geopolitics in Africa and the Transformation of UN Peacekeeping Missions in the 21st Century

DOI:

Цитирование. Пушкина Д. Б., Сингх Х. Поддержание мира как проекция силы: геополитика США в Африке и трансформация миротворческих миссий ООН в XXI веке // Вестник Волгоградского государственного университета. Серия 4, История. Регионоведение. Международные отношения. – 2026. – Т. 31, № 2. – С. 20–29. – (На англ. яз.). – DOI:

Introduction. The African continent is considered by many researchers to be one of the most conflict-affected regions in the contemporary international system. With prolonged military presence, multilateral cooperation, and extensive peace support operations, Africa’s transition from post-independence statehood to broader developmental consolidation has faced persistent structural obstacles, including weak state capacity, recurring intrastate conflicts, and governance challenges [26]. These challenges increasingly appear within the security framing of the United Nations peacekeeping objectives, particularly where mission mandates intersect with geopolitical competition involving major powers [18]. While UN peacekeeping was not designed to wield force, under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter [8], the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has the mandate to take collective action during conflict through active measures aimed at prevention, peace enforcement, and peacebuilding. To execute the task, the peacekeeping missions were seen as an alternative to direct military intervention, promoting a more diplomatic, more operationalized, and less militarized resolution to address the conflict [27].

Since its inception, the United Nations peacekeeping missions have been under scrutiny concerning the organization’s effectiveness in establishing peace, as early as the mediation missions of the UN Truce Supervision Organization [35] in 1948 to observe the peace process between the State of Palestine and Israel and the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) in 1949 to resolve the conflict, as both of them have failed to produce meaningful resolutions.

To conduct the operations, the peacekeeping force carries them out when in compliance with the core traditional peacekeeping principles that include the necessary invitation by the conflict state, the consent of conflict parties for UN PKO (peacekeeping operations), the maintenance of impartiality, and the use of force only in selfdefense. The success of the missions depends on the political cooperation shaping the region; however, it is also largely shaped by the resources, on-ground manpower, and state mandate [28]. The Charter does not have specific provisions that mandate the PKO to resolve the conflicts, so the PKO evolved to address such instability.

Through the Cold War era, the United States pursued a balanced position on UN peacekeeping, where it largely abstained from voting on UN missions when the Soviet Union’s and the People’s Republic of China’s interests were at play [7], often embracing a policy of not committing large combat forces to UN missions, preferring European or

Commonwealth troops and providing the diplomatic support. Since the 1990s, the new geopolitical reality has been engulfed with intrastate conflicts with far-reaching complications.

Between 1989 and 1994, the number of UN peacekeepers grew rapidly to over 70,000 in 10 missions [29]. This expansion in numbers and appearance of unipolarity on the international stage once again brought UN peacekeeping under scrutiny, as the new American geopolitical mantle began to restructure the institution in combination with Article 42 of the Charter’s Chapter VII [9]. This article has become important for intrastate conflict resolution since it stated that the UNSC has the right to enforce peace against the consent of the conflict parties, which erodes the essence of the core principles of traditional peacekeeping. However, the limited funds and peacekeeping staff to resolve complex situations led the UN to shift from traditional partnership intervention to a hybrid system of operations where the UN carried out the operation in tandem with the regional organization. This trend is reflected in the UN peacekeeping’s own trajectory for the future and expressed in “The Future of Peacekeeping, New Models, and Related Capabilities” published in 2024 [38].

Methods and materials. This research employs contextual analysis as a core method to investigate the United States’ evolving stance on UN peacekeeping, its missions, and the challenges it poses for UN peacekeeping. By analyzing a variety of texts such as the US National Security Strategy policy documents under recent presidential administrations; the Fiscal Year 2026 Discretionary Budget Requests; as well as the UN Security Council Resolutions and a significant body of academic literature about the topic, this study aims to examine how the US involvement in UN peacekeeping missions affects the missions and their nature. The US policy is based on the internal political context within the US, and the subsequent alterations in their strategic interests on the global arena affect the rest of the world, particularly the regions where the UN peacekeeping missions are currently deployed, such as Africa.

Hybrid missions, which blend traditional peacekeeping with military operations, present unique complexities. Since the United States weaves its strategic interests into peacekeeping objectives by way of financial and material leverage in the UN, peacekeeping missions drift from traditional apolitical intervention to a hybrid model where the outreach of the mission is significantly defined by the political objectives of Washington rather than structural conditions, as is the case in a number of UN PKOs in Africa. Therefore, it is relevant to analyze the long-term consequences of hybrid missions and their stability in reducing violence in the African region by using the case studies of the ongoing PKOs on the continent.

Several significant documents have been examined. The document “US Funding to the UN System” highlights the financial role of the US in UN peacekeeping and the underlying strategic calculations that influence funding decisions. United Nations Security Council Resolution 2436 (2018) [34] focuses on improving the accountability and effectiveness of UN peacekeeping missions, shedding light on the operational challenges of hybrid missions. UNSC Resolution 2098 (2013) [33] established the first offensive UN peacekeeping force, the Intervention Brigade, within the MONUSCO mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, signaling a shift towards more militarized peacekeeping. National Security Strategy (NSS) Reports offer insights into the strategic priorities that shape US involvement in international peacekeeping. The analysis of US National Security Strategy policy documents provides the Presidential Administration’s position on peacekeeping [24].

By examining these documents, the authors are better equipped to understand the extent to which the UN has engaged in hybrid missions and US participation in such missions through finance and troops [36]. By contextualizing these missions within legal and political frameworks, this study provides insight into the relationship between the United States and UN peacekeeping missions in Africa in recent years with a focus on prospects, exploring how this relationship may evolve in the coming years.

Analysis. This article analyzes the following research question: how has US geopolitical strategy transformed UN peacekeeping missions from a cooperative endeavor into a tool of strategic leverage? With evolving geopolitical dynamics, the existing research lacks an in-depth analysis of the political nature of peacekeeping missions and how they oscillate between peace and stability with strategic and geopolitical interests. This research argues that US commitment to UN peacekeeping missions is often momentary and dependent on the United States’ pursuit of its own strategic interests, which, due to the significant influence that the US holds over UN Peacekeeping, compels the latter to engage in hybrid missions.

The relationship between US foreign policy and UN peacekeeping has generated a substantial body of scholarship. Karlsrud [19] offers a comprehensive treatment of how multipolar geopolitics is reshaping UN peacekeeping mandates and operations, identifying the growing tension between the US’ preferences and the rising contributions of China and other powers. Loidolt [23] specifically addresses the dimension of strategic competition, analyzing how the United States increasingly views UN peacekeeping as a platform for managing geopolitical rivalry rather than a purely normative endeavor.

The financial dimension of US engagement is analyzed by Attramadal [4], who tracks how US contributions fluctuated between the Obama and Trump administrations as a function of political conditions. Schaefer [30] examines the legacy of the Helms – Biden Act and calls for a new framework governing the US–UN financial relations, while the US Government Accountability Office [36] has documented the costeffectiveness advantages of UN peacekeeping relative to unilateral US military deployments.

On hybrid missions specifically, Pelz and Lehmann [25] provide the foundational conceptual framework, defining hybridization as the integration of UN peacekeeping with regional organizations within a single mandated operation. Kumar [21] examines the UNAMID mission in Darfur as a case study of the practical and political limitations of the hybrid model. Soderberg [32] provides a baseline analysis of US support for UN peacekeeping prior to the major strategic shifts of the late 2010s, highlighting a model of limited but supportive engagement that contrasts with the more conditional and strategically driven approach observed after 2017. The trend towards hybridization of UN peacekeeping missions has been noted by many contemporary researchers of UN peacekeeping, particularly in the case of UN PKOs in Africa. Adekera [1], Furlow [15],

Bokeriya, and Khudaykulova [6] all conclude that successful conflict resolution in the African region will depend on how effectively UN peacekeeping cooperates with regional organizations that often serve as a “middleman” between the UN and local governments, distrustful of the organization due to the perceived high influence of the USA on the UN and its peacekeeping efforts [31].

The Obama administration’s approach to externalizing the military burden is examined by Krieg [20], who frames it as part of a broader doctrine of indirect intervention. The strategic implications of the 2022 National Security Strategy for peacekeeping are assessed by Hamid et al. [16], who highlight the explicit linkage between multilateral engagement and great-power competition with other major powers. Cai et al. [7] analyze the evolving role of the UN Security Council in maintaining peace during geopolitical transition, contextualizing US behavior within a broader pattern of great-power rivalry.

Despite the existing body of literature, the field lacks an integrated analysis that traces US policy across administrations and connects funding conditionality, hybrid mission design, and strategic competition in a single analysis. This article aims to address that gap.

With the expanding geopolitical interests and growing points of contestation, peacekeeping missions have weighed more on political consensus, limiting the traditional peacekeeping principles. The United States no longer views UN peacekeeping as a cooperative space but as a strategic maneuver to secure its interests through its involvement in conflict zones [23]. The emergence of new security challenges and new regions of contestation has transformed peacekeeping operations.

In particular, the United States has begun to use UN peacekeeping as an extension of its global strategy. Under the Obama administration, UN missions were seen as a cost-effective alternative to US military intervention and a viable investment [20] to advance American security interests, which is confirmed by a report published by the US Government Publishing Office stating that peacekeeping missions concluded the operations for which the US military would have required double the budget [4].

In recent times the US participation in UN peacekeeping missions has significantly reduced, measured by the fact that just 24 US peacekeepers serve as military staff officers in six ongoing UN peacekeeping missions – a downward trajectory from its highest number of 115 peacekeepers in 1993 [19]. This raises a question about US’ continued interest in the UN peacekeeping agenda and impacts the ongoing processes and credibility of UN PKOs such as Sudan UN peacekeeping mission that concluded in 2021 and was seen as a failure to de-escalate the ongoing violence [21].

The United States has been the most significant financial contributor to UN peacekeeping [17], providing 26.95% of the budget in the financial year of 2024–2025. The analysis of the conditions that lead US to support or withhold funding is a direct result of the US president and congressional consensus that has oscillated at a peculiar pace, responding to the trend of politics that has been established by Trump’s first administration since 2017 and which has proved to be an interesting development in American policy towards the United Nations.

This strategic interest vested its power through the US position in the UN Security Council that shapes peacekeeping mandates and priorities. The role of domestic political polarization in shaping US policy toward UN peacekeeping may become a more prominent theme, as the research sheds light on the United States seeing the UN peacekeeping missions as a strategic leverage to address logistical burdens while addressing the emerging geopolitical competition. This has been seen as a challenge, exacerbating existing tensions and insecurity that have limited the on-ground success of the missions [19]. The strategic interests of the United States define the level of commitment; for example, the United States has supported missions that have geopolitical stakes, which could be seen in Africa (e.g., MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo) and in the Middle East (e.g., UNIFIL in Lebanon).

The growing influence of China and other emerging powers in UN peacekeeping may lead to studies on how the US adapts its policy to maintain its leadership. The limitations of UN peacekeeping with US policy settings come when academic literature often critiques the inefficiencies and limitations of UN peacekeeping, especially in being slow to adapt to complex conflicts, lacking sufficient resources, and struggling with unclear mandates. These inefficiencies often hinder mission effectiveness and prolong conflicts.

To combat these inefficiencies, the US has pushed for the integration of advanced technologies, such as drones for surveillance, data analytics for conflict prediction, and communication tools to enhance situational awareness. The issue of abuse by peacekeepers has been addressed [11] since the US has supported measures to strengthen accountability mechanisms, including stricter vetting, transparency, and victim support systems.

Another area that researchers are skeptical about is the hybrid missions that combine traditional peacekeeping with counterterrorism, stabilization, or state-building efforts. These missions are becoming more frequent in conflicts involving the intersection of political instability, terrorism, and armed groups. These operations often encounter difficulties, including maintaining civilian safety, managing complicated political environments, and striking a balance between the use of force and peacekeeping ideals. The United States has frequently provided financial, logistical, and intelligence support for hybrid missions. However, political and strategic factors occasionally restrict their direct involvement [19].

By finding an equilibrium, the US pursues the hybrid models within the spectrum of conventional peacekeeping efforts, which poses a question of how well the hybrid missions will accomplish long-term stability and peace if political interests and domestic policy uncertainties are involved, particularly in the last decade. Some operations have combined US strategic interests in a novel way when operating the UN peacekeeping missions by adopting a hybrid element, where the United Nations works jointly with one or more non-UN actors within a single mandated operation. For illustration, the African Union – United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur was formally co-managed by the African Union and the United Nations, sharing command strategies and fiscal budget [21].

The integration involves parallel deployments to fully integrated command forces, blending the UN peacekeeping with regional forces to achieve high efficiency in operation execution, such as G5 Sahel forces. These missions add capabilities and regional expertise but also frustrate coordination and cast skepticism over the operational mandate. The strategic objectives that the United States seeks to achieve are rooted in the NSS, which consistently appeals to American primacy, where the United States retains the hegemonic leadership while rhetorically framing to preserve a free and open world. This rhetorical juxtaposition has become a recurring feature of US foreign policy rather than an anomaly. In practice, US strategy prioritizes security maximization, economic interests, and strategic hedging against competing powers, thereby shaping both the selection and conduct of UN peacekeeping missions [19].

The United Nations Peacekeeping was designed as an impartial mechanism for conflict resolution. However, United Nations peacekeeping missions have been one of the cornerstones for “Multilateralism in Action,” an essential yet underutilized instrument in navigating peace and security in recent years. With the emerging geopolitical interests of the United States, these peacekeeping missions serve its security agendas, particularly through hybridization, merging traditional peacekeeping with counterterrorism and stabilization. In the National Security Strategy, one of the priorities was to “... isolate governments that refuse to act as responsible partners in advancing hemispheric peace and prosperity” [3], while embracing principled realism, as it acknowledges the central role of power in international politics, affirms that sovereign states are the best hope for a peaceful world, and clearly defines national interests.

The UN peacekeeping missions act on the mandate of the UNSC and intervene on the invitation of the state to monitor, examine, and collaborate with the state organization to deescalate violence and ensure regional stability. The UN peacekeeping mission’s effectiveness is often defined by the political circumstances on the ground and the extent of political and financial support to the designated mission, demonstrating the UN peacekeeping mission’s dependence on stakeholders [25] such as China and the United States.

The United States has shown a long-lasting commitment to the UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, supporting the hybrid missions in Sudan and Mali with the assistance of the African Union. These missions aim at realizing peace and stability in the region, while for the United States, it reduces the cost of operations and burden on the United States military not to engage directly while securing the strategic interests in the region [36]. For instance, the study published in 2018 titled “UN Peacekeeping: Cost Estimate for Hypothetical US Operation Exceeds Actual Costs for Comparable UN Operation” [30] revealed that UN peacekeeping can be up to eight times more cost-effective than deploying US troops to a conflict zone. Despite the absence of direct impacts on the United States’ security, regional instability poses the capacity to harbor, nurture, and expand the non-state actors’ network, which could threaten the United States’ interests in the region.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there was a shift in the US approach towards securitization. The Bush administration’s “war on terror” heavily relied on “coalition-led militaries” rather than UN-mandated peacekeepers. This era witnessed ambivalence towards UN institutions and continuous scrutiny of failure to successfully conclude the missions. The era of unipolarity has been definitive, which is also reflected at the congressional level. Congress enacted the Helms – Biden Act in 1999 to cap the US contribution to the UN budget, fixed at 25 percent [22].

Under the Obama administration, there was constant engagement through multilateral institutionalism, which resulted in a surge in US contributions, however, within the mandated funding cap, as well as participation in training and intelligence sharing [13] for the missions in Africa and Asia. The focus remained aligned with US foreign policy objectives of reinstating American primacy through multilateralism.

Under the Biden administration, the promises of the Obama administration were reaffirmed by engagement with allies through international institutions, including the United Nations. In 2022 the US National Security Strategy highlighted the reassurance of the United States in its commitment to support the UN peacekeeping missions, stating, “We will work with allies to strengthen UN peacekeeping, ensuring missions are appropriately mandated, resourced, and accountable” [37], while advocating for modernization of the peacekeeping missions to address new threats such as cybersecurity and drone warfare [11]. Thus, National Security

Strategy 2022 [14] explicitly established an international peacebuilding approach as a broader part of counterterrorism efforts, while signaling that the US support for UN missions will now be considered in light of the existing strategic rivalries with other major powers.

Both of Trump’s administrations took a skeptical stance towards multilateralism, especially towards the United Nations, which is reflected in the “Fiscal Year 2026 Discretionary Budget Request” [13] that includes eliminating US funding for all UN projects, including UN peacekeeping missions, citing “the United States has a history of paying for more than its fair share of international peacekeeping activities” as the reason. To meet the objectives, the United States leverages UN peacekeeping budgeting authority as a lever to demand readjustment in peace operations.

The US continued to express dissatisfaction with the ongoing missions and proposed funding cuts, which, under Trump’s second administration, have been accelerating. The common thread is that the US has tied its participation to its strategic and geopolitical considerations, which allows it to wield influence, secure resources, and continue the great power rivalry [16].

The United States practiced different methods to implement its strategic partnership with UN peacekeeping throughout various geographic areas. It conducted the majority of its hybrid mission assistance to African conflicts through its support of three specific operations, which include UNAMID in Sudan, MINUSMA in Mali, and MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as African conflicts present both strategic interests and a chance to share financial expenses with African regional organizations. To illustrate, the United States categorized jihadist violence in the Sahel region of Mali as an immediate danger to its national security interests, which resulted in active US embassy efforts to develop local military capabilities [2]. The United States backed MONUSCO’s Intervention Brigade which became the first offensive UN force through Resolution 2098 (2013) [33] because it supported American objectives to bring stability to a country with critical geographic importance.

The UNMISS operation in South Sudan demonstrates how peacekeeping efforts interact with the great power competition that exists between major powers. China used UNMISS to safeguard oil fields, owned by Chinese firms, because UN peacekeeping operations protect commercial interests, according to Bodetti’s analysis [5]. The United States responded to the mission by pursuing its own agenda during the Security Council’s discussions, which aimed to reduce Chinese power within United Nations operations.

The United States has chosen to engage strategically only in areas where its national interests are most essential to protect. For example, it preferred to conduct its operations through NATO instead of United Nations mandates during the 1990s Balkans missions because of its operational needs, while in Central America it implemented standard peacekeeping operations through observer missions that used limited hybrid elements because US observers perceived lower strategic threats in the region.

Results. The United States is the largest contributor to the UN budget, which means that around 1.3 billion dollars [14] of American taxpayers’ money goes to UN peacekeeping. This grants the United States de facto leverage over the UN peacekeeping missions while slashing the military expenditure by half to achieve the identical security objectives in those regions by substituting the military forces through peacekeepers. This dynamic is also evident in the Security Council.

Another area of US interest is the counterterrorism strategy, which has become a central pillar of the US security policy. Through financial leverage and political influence over UN peacekeeping operations, UN PKOs in conflict-prone regions often intersect with terrorism, giving the US another reason to reaffirm its hegemonic leadership [10]. As was previously mentioned, Mali is a case in point where the jihadist violence in the Sahel has been framed by US policy as a direct threat to American security, which triggered an immediate response by the active involvement of the US embassy in capacity-building measures of the regional forces to eliminate the jihadist threat to American security interests in the region. The counterterrorism imperative also assists in providing a comprehensive understanding of US cooperation with other actors through the United Nations peacekeeping operations, such as Sahel [2], highlighting how the US counterterrorist agenda shapes peacekeeping by justifying the US to assert strategic control over United Nations deployments at the extremist hotspots.

Finally, the United States sees UN PKOs as a domain of rivalry with other major global leaders such as the People’s Republic of China, as their growing role in the United Nations [12] and African region has been a particular concern. In recent years Beijing has dramatically increased its peacekeeper contributions, assumed the second position in the funding of UN peacekeeping, and has used peacekeeping operations to protect its investments overseas. The most glaring illustration was the South Sudan case, where China leveraged UNMISS to defend oil fields in which Chinese companies held an equity [5]. The U.S. responded not by withdrawing support, but by pushing its own agenda and expressing its position in Security Council debates.

Over the last thirty years, the US has aspired to shift its financier role in UN peacekeeping to a more assertive strategy due to the resurgence of geopolitical realities. This manifestation of leverage by the United States over funding, counterterrorism imperatives, and rivalries has reoriented many UN missions from purely cooperative endeavors to instruments of strategic influence through hybridization of peacekeeping missions, blending traditional peacekeeping with military operations.

At the central stage, the US continues to hedge its deep engagement within the UN peacekeeping to design and steer the UN peacekeeping operations in the direction of the American security goals. This transformation, on the one hand, brings resources and capabilities by insisting on robust mandates and accountability. The United States declares that it wants to ensure that UN peacekeeping has clear objectives and support among the allies. On the other hand, treating peacekeeping as a geopolitical instrument undermines the normative nature of UN peacekeeping by superseding the political consent and leading to the crisis of legitimacy in missions, as was illustrated by PKOs in the African region. The UN interests are moving towards more flexible funding, as stated in the UNSC Resolution 2719 [37], and that could accommodate US preferences for burden-sharing with allies.

In conclusion, the US has aspired to change the character of UN peacekeeping in the 21st century by steering the UN peacekeeping operations into aligning with American strategic interests, as the peacekeeping missions continue to drift from politically neutral and consent-based interventions into hybrid models whose agenda is determined by the objectives of the major political powers, such as the United States, that use them as leverage to address their interests abroad. However, American hegemonic leadership might be on its way to decline, as the new geopolitical rivals challenge the long-standing American primacy. Moving forward, a delicate diplomatic engagement and confidence-building measures among the UNSC members and between UN peacekeeping and regional organizations will be pivotal for the smooth functioning of the UN peacekeeping missions in the future.

A CKNO WLEDGEMENTS

The authors express special thanks to Mariia Lozhkina for research and editing assistance and to Alexandra Dorofeeva for editing assistance.