Description
At a time of geopolitical shifts, UN Member States’ shifting priorities, and peacekeeping’s entry into a period of ‘marginalization’ as an instrument in global politics (Karlsrud, 2023; also Coleman and Williams, 2021), discussions around the future of peacekeeping orient around finding ways to ‘do less with less’ (Russo, 2025). Heavily driven by considerations that are pragmatic rather than by what scholarly studies have shown ‘works’ in the peacekeeping domain, this paper offers an analysis of the evidentiary basis behind current options on the table, focusing on (a) missions deployed under the guise of non-traditional collective security frameworks and (b) in more fragmented forms in line with a so-called ‘modular approach’. To this end, I consider how these new models of peace operations may fare from the vantage point of existing scholarship. I focus on the Protection of Civilians (POC) agenda as one domain of peacekeeping efforts that has grown in prominence – constituting a yardstick against which at least UN peacekeeping efforts are likely to be judged – and reflect on prospects for POC success for the next stage of peace operations.
