New Peacemakers and Old International Institutions

The international framework for peacemaking and peacebuilding is going through a period of profound change. In the post-Cold War era, states and civil society actors invested in building up the international institutional architecture for preventing and resolving conflicts. Organizations including the United Nations (UN) and regional entities such as the African Union (AU) oversaw a generation of ambitious – although imperfect – mediation efforts and peace operations. But if the hallmark of the 1990s and early 2000s was the institutionalization of peacemaking, this process is now going into reverse. Hampered by worsening geopolitical tensions and funding shortages, the UN and other inter-governmental institutions are playing a decreasing role in conflict management, creating political space for ambitious alternative peacemakers to occupy.

The Rise of Middle Power Mediators

In many recent conflicts, middle powers such as Turkey and the Gulf Arab countries have led political processes that multilateral bodies might once have guided. As Roger Mac Ginty notes in his contribution to this volume, these players can muster diplomatic and financial resources quickly, while bodies like the UN Security Council are entangled in diplomatic infighting.

The U.S. is also sharply altering its approach to international peacemaking. U.S. President Donald Trump has shown scant regard for international law and institutions in his operations targeting Venezuela and Iran. Yet he has also pitched himself as a peacemaker. In the first year of his second term, he rushed to broker deals in the Middle East, Asia and Africa in addition to talking to Russia over Ukraine. Visiting the UN in September 2025, he belittled the UN’s own efforts at peacemaking, and complained that the organization did not help him. His administration has, however, accelerated the decline of multilateral peace efforts by withholding or slow-rolling funding for UN peace operations and humanitarian aid to conflict-affected states. In January 2026 it also announced¹ the formation of a new “Board of Peace” that could act as a parallel structure for diplomacy to the UN, uninhibited by the laws and practices that shape discussions in the older institution. The Board’s Charter – which a couple of dozen states have endorsed – criticizes bodies that “institutionalize crisis.”

This process² of “deinstitutionalization” raises questions not only about who will make peace in future conflicts, but also what sort of peace agreements they will pursue and how to ensure their implementation. In the short term, as mediation expert Teresa Whitfield notes, the presence of ambitious mediators competing for a role in ending a conflict can lead to coordination problems and time-wasting as envoys bargain over the respective roles in a process.³ In the longer term, there are also questions over what strategies different actors will aim to pursue.

The development of the post-Cold War peacemaking architecture was associated with – and helped inspire – a specific set of ideas about how to build peace. As Stephen John Stedman and I have argued,⁴ the UN and other mediators developed a “standard treatment” for conflicts, which included the mediation of political settlements, the deployment of peacekeeping forces to back them up and long-term investment in institution-building in weak states. These processes did not always go to plan and in some cases – such as Rwanda – went horrifically wrong. Critics worried⁵ that peacemakers were treating conflicts in a “template” fashion, applying the same set of tools in different cases, rather than looking at the specific challenges in each case. While these criticisms had merit, the UN and partners did establish more-or-less credible mechanisms for backing mediation processes, deploying peacekeeping forces and raising peacebuilding funds.

Flexible non-institutional mediators are often best-placed to carve out short-term political deals between combatants, especially if the U.S. or another major power is on board. But they will often lack either the sustained focus or the implementation capacity necessary to build on these initial successes.

The Sidelining of the UN in Favor of Ad-Hoc Cooperations

In a context where these institutions and mechanisms are weakening, by contrast, peacemakers are often falling back on improvised alternatives – or having to turn back to international institutions to help.

Two cases in point are Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In the Haitian case, the Biden administration pushed the Security Council to mandate an ad hoc multinational security force led by Kenya to address spiraling gang violence in 2023. U.S. officials argued that this option was preferable to a UN-led force, in part because a previous blue helmet operation had brought cholera into Haiti in the 2010s. While the broader political logic to work outside of the UN was solid, the operational realities of getting the mission on the ground proved hard. The Kenyan-led operation had to create new administrative and logistical structures, and struggled to mobilize enough troops as it did not have a guaranteed source of funding. By 2025 it was clear that the mission was unsustainable, and the Trump administration – having mulled other options – successfully lobbied the Security Council to back⁶ a larger “Gang Suppression Force” with operational back-up and partial funding from a UN support office.

In the case of the DRC, Qatar and the U.S. succeeded in brokering a political deal between the Congolese government and Rwanda to end the activities of a Rwandan-backed rebel force (the M23) in May 2025. While the UN has had peacekeepers in the DRC for twenty-five years, the mediators kept the organization at arms-length from the peacemaking efforts, although they did involve the AU. As my colleagues at the International Crisis Group warned⁷ at the time of the initial agreement, it lacked clear enforcement mechanisms. Doha and Washington continued to work on the diplomatic details through the year, with Kinshasa signing separate deals with Rwanda and the M23 in the fall. However, these pacts did little to halt violence on the ground and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz has emphasized⁸ that the U.S. will continue to support the peacekeeping force in DRC to help backstop the implementation of the plan.

The Congolese case points to a tension that may recur in future conflicts and peace processes. Flexible non-institutional mediators are often best-placed to carve out short-term political deals between combatants, especially if the U.S. or another major power is on board. But they will often lack either the sustained focus or the implementation capacity necessary to build on these initial successes.

Implementation Efforts May Still Require the UN

The problems associated with implementing peace deals – and the advantages of having an institutional backstop to assist - are not new to mediators. In the case of the 2016 peace deal between Colombia and the FARC rebel group, for example, Norway was the lead mediator. When it came to implementing the agreement, Norway persuaded the Colombian government to agree to the deployment of a UN political mission to monitor the process. The UN presence has played a steadying role in supporting the deal to date, despite shifts in the country’s domestic politics.

As ambitious mediators such as Turkey and Qatar work on future political deals they may look to the UN and other multilateral partners to assist with their implementation (as a parallel, Turkey worked with UN on both the negotiation and implementation of the Black Sea Grain Initiative between Russia and Ukraine in 2022). However, international organizations will still face questions about how they approach peace implementation. The current U.S. administration has, for example, complained that many peacekeeping missions last too long and do not have a clear exit strategy. Washington underlined this concern in the summer of 2025 when it pushed⁹ for the closure of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which has been operating since the late 1970s. The Trump administration has also refused to support a proposal for the UN to fund the AU stabilization force in Somalia, in part because it sees this as an open-ended deployment.

U.S. officials have also questioned how international organizations envisage peace implementation. In the post-Cold War era international missions expanded their activities to cover a panoply of tasks – such as promoting the political inclusion of women and addressing conflict risks associated with climate change – that reach far beyond classic hard security tasks. The U.S. has argued that the UN should deprioritize these tasks, and threatened¹⁰ to leave the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) unless it refocuses on its “core functions” of promoting peace and security and devotes fewer resources on social issues and governance.

In the meantime, many multilateral missions are also facing growing pushback from the governments that they are meant to support. After Mali forced¹¹ the UN to withdraw peacekeepers from its territory in 2023, the governments of Sudan, Iraq and Somalia demanded that the organization shutter political offices on their territories (although in the Iraqi and Somali cases this has been a phased process). At a time when these organizations are weak, many states recognize that they can limit or end operations on their territory without risking any serious penalties.

Nonetheless, international institutions still have openings to assist countries transitioning out of conflict. In 2026, the UN is hoping to move political staff working on Syria from their previous base in Geneva to Damascus, with the goal of giving more support to the authorities that replaced Bashar al-Assad’s regime in 2024. While the retreat of international institutions in peacemaking is a reality, there are still places where they can provide security, political advice and technical expertise. Although alternative actors are currently in the ascendant as mediators and deal-makers, it is a mistake to overlook the continued value of more institutionalized peacebuilding.

Footnotes

1. Richard Gowan and Daniel Forti, “Trump’s Board of Peace Will Weaken International Cooperation,” Foreign Policy, January 22, 2026, https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/01/22/trump-board-of-peace-united-nations-gaza-ukraine-international-cooperation/. ↩

2. Malte Brosig and John Karlsrud, “How Ad Hoc Coalitions Deinstitutionalize International Institutions,” International Affairs 100, no. 2 (March 2024): 771–89, https://academic.oup.com/ia/article/100/2/771/7609296. ↩

3. Teresa Whitfield, “Minilateral Mechanisms for Peacemaking in a Multipolar World: Friends, Contact Groups, Troikas, Quads, and Quints,” International Peace Institute, May 2025, https://www.ipinst.org/2025/05/minilateral-mechanisms-for-peacemaking-in-a-multipolar-world-friends-contact-groups-troikas-quads-and-quints. ↩

4. Richard Gowan and Stephen John Stedman, “The International Regime for Treating Civil War, 1988–2017,” Daedalus 147, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 171–84, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48563415. ↩

5. Center on International Cooperation, Review of Political Missions 2010 (New York: New York University Center on International Cooperation, 2010), https://s42831.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/political_missions_20101.pdf. ↩

6. United Nations, “Haiti: New ‘Suppression Force’ in Haiti amid Gang Violence,” United Nations, https://www.un.org/en/delegate/haiti-new-%E2%80%98suppression-force%E2%80%99-haiti-amid-gang-violence. ↩

7. International Crisis Group, “DR Congo–Rwanda Deal: Now Comes the Hard Part,” International Crisis Group, https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/democratic-republic-congo/dr-congo-rwanda-deal-now-comes-hard-part. ↩

8. Better World Campaign, “Ambassador Waltz Backs MONUSCO, Peace in the DRC,” Better World Campaign, https://betterworldcampaign.org/blog/ambassador-waltz-backs-monusco-peace-in-the-drc. ↩

9. International Crisis Group, “Helping UNIFIL Restore Stability in Southern Lebanon,” International Crisis Group, https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/lebanon/helping-unifil-restore-stability-southern-lebanon. ↩

10. SHR Monitor, “The US Threatens to Leave the OSCE Unless the Organization Reforms,” SHR Monitor, https://www.shrmonitor.org/the-us-threatens-to-leave-the-osce-unless-the-organization-reforms/. ↩

11. International Crisis Group, “What Future for UN Peacekeeping in Africa After Mali Shutters Its Mission,” International Crisis Group, https://www.crisisgroup.org/global-mali/what-future-un-peacekeeping-africa-after-mali-shutters-its-mission. ↩