Autocracies Shoulder More of the Burden in Complex UN Peacekeeping

Why This Question Matters

United Nations peacekeeping is a key tool for maintaining international peace and security, but peacekeeping mandates have become steadily more complex. More ambitious mandates require greater resources, training, and risk, raising a practical challenge: who will provide the personnel and capabilities to carry out these missions?

What Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon Ask

Lisa Hultman, Jacob Kathman, and Megan Shannon investigate whether regime type shapes who contributes to increasingly complex UN peacekeeping mandates. They propose that states—especially non-democracies—may be incentivized to provide larger contributions to complex missions because of tangible and reputational "process" benefits, such as reimbursement payments, training opportunities, and the chance to burnish international standing.

How the Authors Study the Question

The authors conduct a global quantitative analysis of UN member states' peacekeeping contributions from 1990 to 2022. They compare country-level contributions across missions that vary in mandate complexity and examine how those contributions differ between democracies and non-democracies over time. Their empirical strategy focuses on the interaction between mandate complexity and regime type to identify whether complexity systematically changes who supplies personnel and resources.

Key Findings

• As mandate complexity rises, non-democratic states tend to make larger contributions relative to democratic states.
• Democracies do participate in peacekeeping, but they are less likely to make substantial contributions to the most ambitiously mandated missions—even to missions that democratic states often helped design or endorse.
• The observed pattern is consistent with the idea that process benefits attract contributions from non-democracies to complex missions.

What This Means for Policy and Scholarship

These results highlight a recruitment dilemma for the UN: complex, resource-heavy mandates attract relatively more support from non-democratic contributors, creating potential tensions for a liberal international order that relies on democratic leadership and burden-sharing. The findings encourage policymakers to consider how mandate design, incentives, and burden-sharing arrangements shape the composition of peacekeeping forces and the political character of contributors.