HIKMA SUMMIT
OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Institutions Adapt, So Do Peace Operations

Institutions are not static entities; rather, they evolve in response to prevailing material and ideational conditions of the international system. Peace operations are no exception: today, as the global order faces profound changes ­– marked by increased geopolitical competition and the growing contestation of the international liberal order – they are inevitably reconfigured. As the UN's primary instrument for maintaining international peace and security, peace operations are, in the words of Hellmüller and Badache (2025), “children of their time”: their mandates, objectives, and legitimacy are shaped by the dynamics of the world order in which they operate.

Despite alarmist claims about the decline of multilateralism, peace operations are far more likely to adapt than disappear. These institutions persist not merely out of interest, but because international actors recognize them as necessary instruments for managing instability. Consequently, the critical question is not whether peace operations will survive, but how they are transforming to fit a post-liberal environment.

The time for the transformative liberal aspirations of the 1990s and 2000s has decisively passed. That era of ambitious state-building has declined due to operational and strategic disillusionment, making space for a fundamental shift toward stabilization – a pragmatic, security-first logic that prioritizes order and containment over justice. Simultaneously, as the UN Security Council faces growing gridlock, the architecture of peace is becoming "decentered," increasingly relying on regional organizations and military ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) to fill the operational void.

Drawing on Karlsrud’s (2023) portrayal of "pragmatic peacekeeping," this article explains that we are entering an era where the UN increasingly serves as a support structure for enforcement missions led by willing coalitions, marking a decisive move away from the liberal peace consensus and toward a fragmented system of global conflict management.

The Normative Shift: From Transformation to Stabilization

After the end of the Cold War, the normative architecture of peace operations aligned closely with Western liberal values. The Liberal Peace consensus enabled ambitious missions aimed at transforming societies: international interventions were justified by expansive mandates focused on democratization, state-building, and human rights promotion. However, the liberal international order is now challenged by eroding faith in liberalism and external contestation of Western leadership by actors like Russia and China. These dynamics have driven the retreat of transformative peacebuilding and the rise of a security-first logic centered on stabilization, leading to “minimalist” missions in a contested world.

Following the liberal peacebuilding failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Sudan, stabilization emerged as a less ambitious alternative. Driven by both strategic necessity and political choice, the core aim fundamentally shifted from transformation to order. Rather than promoting democracy or human rights, peace operations now mainly serve the domestic political goals of the interveners – notably border control, migration deterrence, and counterterrorism – lowering their transformative aspirations.

As Peter (2024) contends, the erosion of liberal consensus and the de-prioritization of human protection came not only from external challengers but “from within the liberal order itself.” The adoption of stabilization mandates – often aligned with counter-terrorism objectives – pushed peace operations to take sides, jeopardizing core principles such as impartiality and consent. In doing so, the UN has fundamentally compromised its role as a broker capable of resolving conflicts, thereby undermining its own moral authority. Peacekeeping has become increasingly entangled with enforcement coalitions, functioning more as a pragmatic instrument of risk management, and marking the definitive decline of the liberal peace paradigm as a hegemonic framework.

The Structural Shift: “Minilateralism” on the Rise

The fragmentation of normative authority has manifested together with the return of great power rivalry and the paralysis of the UN Security Council, which have made initiating formal, large-scale UN missions increasingly difficult. In this operational vacuum, the UN’s traditional monopoly is giving way to a "decentered" global governance landscape, characterized by regionalization and the rise of other flexible coalitions.

Crucially, this process need not be categorized as negative per se. In fact, as Fawcett (2025) notices, the decentering of international authority reflects a necessary adaptation to a post-hegemonic world. Far from signaling collapse, regionalism is being recast as a driver of renewal, potentially ensuring the continuity of international security governance through more representative, locally grounded frameworks.

Within this decentered landscape, Maglia, Karlsrud, and Reykers (2025) describe these flexible instruments as Military Ad Hoc Coalitions (AHCs): "first-entry" or "parallel" arrangements that allow states to bypass institutional gridlock. AHCs become the preferred choice due to their lower transaction costs, and ability to operate without the rigid and bureaucratic constraints of the UN. They represent a significant shift toward a more pragmatic and  "task-oriented minilateralism," where operational effectiveness and speed are prioritized over broad multilateral legitimacy.

However, this does not signify the irrelevance of the UN, but rather its functional adaptation. Karlsrud (2023) argues that we are witnessing the normalization of “UN Support Missions,” where the UN provides bureaucratic and logistical backing to these regional or ad hoc enforcement coalitions. This creates a pragmatic division of labor: regional actors undertake high-risk enforcement tasks that the UN cannot politically or operationally sustain, while the UN provides structural support.

Yet, this adaptation carries a profound risk. While it keeps the UN central to the machinery of global security, it threatens to lure the organization into a so called "Kindleberger trap": to maintain its relevance in a security environment dominated by counterterrorism, the UN may be forced to abandon its core principles and support illiberal enforcement measures, fundamentally altering the character of international peace.

A New Framework for Global Conflict Management

The Liberal Peace era has passed, but the time of peace operations has not. Despite the structural fragmentation and normative hollowing previously described, these institutions show a high degree of resilience. Their persistence is explicated by the concept of "collective intentionality": even in a contested world, states hold a shared inter-subjective belief that mechanisms for managing instability remain necessary. Hence, the result is not extinction, but an ongoing transformation into "pragmatic peacekeeping" – a model that is operationally more flexible (ad hoc) and normatively thin (stabilization).

This new framework presents a severe, though not strictly negative – especially for non-Western actors – evolution. We have moved away from the universalist, transformative aspirations of the 1990s toward a fragmented, yet potentially more representative, system of conflict management. While this shift secures the survival of multilateral conflict management, it leaves the future of the global order floating between two divergent paths.

On one hand, there is the risk that the UN survives only by abandoning its liberal soul to serve the security interests of great powers and authoritarian regimes. On the other, this regionalization may birth a more plural and representative international – in the words of Fawcett (2025), a  “multiplex world” where responsibilities are shared among multiple stakeholders rather than dictated by a single hegemon. Whether this decentered future leads to a more inclusive peace or merely a more efficient and instrumental form of containment remains the defining question of the evolution of peace operations.

Bibliography

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