The Twilight of International Peacemaking Institutions?

In this expanded and edited version of a lecture given to the Geneva Centre for Security Policy on 6 May 2025, Crisis Group expert Richard Gowan explores the dilemmas facing UN conflict management and the role multilateral bodies can still play.

These are hard times for formal international institutions. The post-Cold War period saw the rapid expansion of multilateral organisations in numerous policy domains, not least in the spheres of conflict management and peacemaking. These included not only the UN, but also specialised entities including the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), regional bodies such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and legal innovations such as the International Criminal Court (ICC). By trial and error, this network of institutions created a loose framework for mitigating and resolving conflicts, placing constraints on how warring parties fought one another. Today, that framework looks like it is creaking.

In New York and other centres of multilateral affairs, a sense of malaise is widespread. One reason is the current U.S. administration’s drastic cuts to the budgets of international organisations, but the frustrations predate President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Major-power competition has hamstrung the UN over Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Israeli campaign in Gaza, while also complicating diplomacy over crises from Sudan to Myanmar. Similar geopolitical tensions now shape debates in venues such as the OPCW, OSCE and ICC. UN-led conflict management efforts appear to be bogged down in cases such as Haiti and Yemen, where armed groups are hard to corral into peace talks and outside interests often make diplomacy even more difficult. In parallel, a new generation of well-resourced mediators and deal-makers – such as Türkiye and the Gulf Arab states – are increasingly active, though with mixed records of success.

The Rise and Fall of Formal Institutions

If the 1990s and 2000s were a time of institution-building in the field of international security, the world is now in a phase of what international relations scholars Malte Brosig and John Karlsrud call “deinstitutionalisation”, with states “bypassing established rules of procedure enshrined in international institutions” in responding to conflict. Multilateral organisations are not utterly irrelevant. The UN still has 60,000 peacekeepers deployed around the world. But governments do seem doubtful about the post-Cold War institutional system’s effectiveness and inclined to look for alternatives.

While diplomats and even many international officials accept that post-Cold War institutions are in retrenchment, there is little accounting of what is lost through their decline. It is easy to gripe that many international secretariats are inefficient and many multilateral peace initiatives seem to be going nowhere. But it is equally easy to forget that the post-Cold War array of conflict management tools also had distinct, often hard-won, strengths. The UN and other international organisations have built expertise in managing peace processes and – where the path to conflict resolution is fraught – providing life-saving aid and long-term humanitarian assistance to vulnerable civilians. Specialised agencies such the OPCW and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have established themselves as widely, if not universally, trusted arbiters of states’ commitment to non-proliferation. Human rights agencies and international courts have attempted, often in vain, to apply international law to conflicts.

The current generation of international peacemakers increasingly appear inclined to address conflicts with little or no reference to established international mechanisms.

Despite this institutional legacy, the current generation of international peacemakers increasingly appear inclined to address conflicts with little or no reference to established international mechanisms, often because they believe these do not work or because the institutions involved are simply under too much political or financial strain to rely upon. But the result is that they find it difficult to make peace agreements stick or to offer sustainable assistance to the vulnerable.

A brief look at recent Crisis Group analyses of a variety of conflicts illustrates the reality of the retreat of international institutions, the rise of the ad hoc alternatives and the difficulties that ensue. In wars such as those in Sudan and Myanmar, Crisis Group has tracked how successive UN envoys have been politically sidelined, while other bodies have tried to step in. Yet these new players often have little to show for their pains. In the case of Sudan – where African officials, Saudi diplomats, U.S. emissaries and various European state representatives have all had a go at peacemaking since the country collapsed in 2023 – Crisis Group’s Alan Boswell notes that “it is unclear which country or institution could bridge the external divides now breaking Sudan apart”. In Myanmar, China has brokered local ceasefires, and the Association of South East Asian Nations continues to try to mediate the war that began in 2021, but overall diplomacy is “moribund”.

The UN might not do any better in either case, even if it were asked to. A 2024 effort by the UN envoy to Sudan to lead coordination with other mediators fell flat. Teresa Whitfield, formerly of Crisis Group, argues in a recent paper on the rise of “minilateral” mediation that ad hoc groupings of mediators can “complement divided or dysfunctional multilateral organisations”. But as she also observes, such groups can be counterproductive when their members have competing views about how to resolve a conflict or are involved in it via their support for armed proxies.

Holding Up Peace Agreements

Even where alternative mediators do deliver tentative peace deals, a lack of institutional back-up can be an obstacle to their implementation. A key (and, in retrospect, obvious) advance in post-Cold War conflict resolution was the recognition that “peace agreements are not self-executing”. One reason that organisations like the UN and OSCE expanded was precisely to manage the difficult processes of following through with agreements, whether through military peacekeeping or civilian means. But this lesson risks getting lost. Crisis Group has, for example, welcomed the 27 June peace agreement brokered by the U.S. and Qatar between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda to end fighting in the eastern DRC, a problem that the UN has repeatedly tried and failed to deal with over the past quarter-century. Yet, as Crisis Group has also noted, the framework for fulfilling the agreement is thin, spreading responsibility for follow-up among the U.S., which may not stay focused, Qatar and the African Union, which may lack the institutional heft to coax the parties to keep their commitments. Ironically, the agreements’ guarantors may end up turning to the UN – which still has 14,000 peacekeepers in the DRC – to make sure the deal is honoured, even though the organisation was not involved in negotiating it. 

When it comes to deploying forces to help make or enforce peace, bypassing existing institutional mechanisms can create even more headaches. Crisis Group has highlighted this problem in detail in the case of Haiti, where the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden urged the UN Security Council to deploy an ad hoc force led by Kenya to address a breakdown of law and order in 2023. At first, U.S officials supported this step as a smart alternative to deploying UN peacekeepers, given previous blue-helmet missions’ bad reputation in the Caribbean nation. Nonetheless, the process of standing up the improvised force proved exceptionally difficult, as it could not draw on the administrative, financial or logistical back-up that the UN uses to deploy its operations. As Crisis Group warned in February, the Kenyan-led mission has shown courage in taking on the criminal gangs bedevilling Haiti, but it has been “severely underequipped” and operated under the cloud of unresolved financial shortfalls. By the end of its term in office, the Biden administration was pressing the Security Council to consider a blue-helmet mission to replace the Kenyan contingent, though UN officials are still wary of this option, and the Trump administration has let the idea drop for the time being. 

If Haiti has demonstrated the limitations of ad hoc peace operations, the dangers of sidestepping established humanitarian institutions to deliver aid have become clear in Gaza. Since the 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas, the Israeli government has looked to curtail the role of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) – which it accuses of complicity with Hamas – in the occupied Palestinian territories. But the rollout of a U.S.-backed alternative mechanism, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has descended into mayhem, with Israeli forces repeatedly firing on and killing civilians visiting food distribution sites. Some aid experts worry that the U.S. may see the foundation as a precedent for replacing UN aid efforts elsewhere with private ventures. Even if these do not prove to be as chaotic as in Gaza, it is unlikely that they will be able to deliver assistance to vulnerable civilians at the scale UN agencies can manage or over extended periods.

A Case for the Ad Hoc?

These are only a few examples, but there is ample evidence to show that pursuing peace initiatives – or attempting to mitigate conflict – without the support of formal, rule-governed institutions creates complications. But this general truth comes with three important caveats. One is that there are circumstances in which an ad hoc approach is preferable to an institutional approach. It may simply be faster, or it may circumvent deep-seated political problems inside an institution. Crisis Group has, for example, cautiously welcomed efforts by European governments to establish “coalitions of the willing” to address security challenges on the continent, which help get around potential obstacles posed by Russia (in the OSCE) or the U.S. (in NATO). In crises, decision-makers do not always have the luxury of choosing between ad hoc and institutional approaches – sometimes it is necessary to halt a war without delay and sort out the details afterward.

A second caveat is that interested parties – whether they are peacemakers or the different sides to a conflict – do not view the involvement of international institutions purely in terms of efficiency. Instead, their preferences are inevitably driven by political considerations. In the case of Haiti, U.S. officials briefly floated the idea that the Organization of American States (OAS) could run a peace operation, even though it lacks the necessary institutional experience and legal basis to deploy a robust mission to Port-au-Prince. Washington appears to have been motivated by a desire to avoid discussing blue-helmet peacekeeping options with China and Russia at the UN Security Council. It also presented this option as a test of OAS members’ willingness to be helpful.

Many conflict parties resent what they see as multilateral organisations’ intrusion into their affairs.

The third caveat is that, in the current moment of international confusion, many states and armed groups see political advantage in reducing the role of international institutions in their affairs. Many conflict parties resent what they see as multilateral organisations’ intrusion into their affairs. For some conflict parties, formal institutions simply present an unacceptable constraint on their freedom of action; others see supposedly impartial multilateral bodies as tools of the U.S. and other big powers.

In Mali, the government demanded that the UN withdraw a peacekeeping force in 2023 in part because it objected to UN human rights reporting on its own counter-insurgency operations. In the Middle East, Iran has become suspicious of the IAEA – even before the mid-June U.S. strikes on its nuclear facilities – because it believes the organization’s reports are biased against it. Meanwhile, in its war with Hamas, Israel has made a point of sidelining the UN system, which it sees as fundamentally prejudiced against it. It has not only called UNRWA an accomplice in terrorism, and targeted other UN agencies working in the Gaza Strip, but also challenged or ignored UN peacekeeping forces on its borders as it aims to establish military dominance throughout its neighbourhood. In such cases, the process of “deinstitutionalisation” is driven by the decisions of conflict parties on the ground, rather than debates inside the institutions themselves. 

What future is left, then, for formal international institutions in crisis management? For the time being, the process of deinstitutionalising conflict resolution is far from complete. In many cases, countries that want to bypass the rules of an organisation still want to gain access to multilateral support or endorsement for their efforts. As Crisis Group’s study of European coalitions of the willing observes, “while these are not NATO activities, much of the discussion takes place at NATO”. The UN also still acts as a space where representatives from different regions can share their perspectives on security questions, even if its operational role is gradually shrinking. Formal organisations that are currently struggling may also retain the potential to play a useful role in the future. In the case of the OSCE, which has been close to paralysis since Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, the body could become a repository for new arms control agreements with Moscow, should the two sides decide to put limits on their respective military build-ups.

While both the international system and international peacemaking are liable to grow more fragmented in the years ahead, parts of the post-Cold War international system can still provide useful backstops to established or future peace deals and processes. Leaders of the UN and other formal institutions will need to be entrepreneurial about selling the advantages of cooperation: they can no longer assume that they will be included in peace initiatives as a matter of course. Diplomats who dismiss formal institutions may have good cause to return to them in the future. To adapt a phrase attributed to Winston Churchill about the difficulty of fighting with allies, there is only one worse thing than making peace with international institutions – and that is making peace without them.