2018 sees ‘lowest’ multilateral peace ops. since 2013

A newly-released report on multilateral peace operations has revealed that 2018 witnessed the lowest number of peace operations since 2013. The report released Wednesday on the occasion of International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that 2018 was “relatively uneventful year” for multilateral peace operations vis-a-vis deployment of missions and personnel. “Sixty missions and operations active globally during 2018 qualified as multilateral peace operations,” the SIPRI report said. “This was three fewer than in the previous year and the lowest number of peace operations active in one year since 2013,” it added. The UN conducted 21 multilateral peace operations in 2018, various regional organizations and alliances led 33, and six were carried out by ad hoc coalitions of states. According to the report, 24 of the missions were deployed in Africa, three in the Americas, Five in Asia and Oceania, 18 in Europe and 10 in the Middle East. The NATO Mission Iraq (NMI) was the only new peace operation launched in 2018. The UN also deployed an “advance team” to Yemen in December 2018 to begin monitoring aspects of the Stockholm Agreement, but it was not until January 2019 that it was upgraded to a peace operation (the UN Mission to Support the Hudaydah Agreement, UNMHA). ‘Little fluctuation’ The report mentions that there was “little fluctuation” in the number of personnel deployed in all multilateral peace operations globally. “There was a minimal decrease of 0.8 percent over the course of the year, from 145 911 to 144 791. Although the number of personnel in the field decreased for the third year in a row,” it added. The African Union (AU) Mission in Somalia remained the largest multilateral peace operation which began in 2015, maintaining a personnel strength of approximately 21,000 throughout the year. The SIPRI report said that the number of personnel deployed in UN peace operations decreased for the third year in a row in 2018. “The number of personnel in UN peace operations fell by 2.9 percent during 2018, from 98 354 to 95 488. As a consequence, it reached the lowest level in the entire 2009–18 period,” it added. Similarly, the number of personnel deployed in non-UN peace operations increased by 3.7% during 2018, from 47,557 to 49,303. “This was a result primarily of the strengthening of the NATO-led RSM in Afghanistan (from 15 046 to 16 910 personnel),” the report said. The number of hostile deaths -- that is, fatalities caused by malicious acts -- was much lower in 2018 than in the previous year, when there were 59 hostile deaths in UN peace operations, including 15 troops from Tanzania in a single incident in eastern DRC in December 2017. A total of 98 personnel involved in UN peace operations who died in 2018 were awarded posthumously the Dag Hammarskjöld Medal.