“Troop Contributing Countries for United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Motivations, Trends and Profiles in the 21st Century”

PERCOCO, JUAN IGNACIO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; XXVII Congreso Mundial de Ciencia Política ? IPSA/AISP; 2023

IPSA

United Nations peacekeeping operations (PKOs) are one of the most graphic manifestations of the Organisation's commitment to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war". Since 1948, the Organization has deployed 71 peacekeeping operations on five continents around the globe. To date, more than 1 million men and women have served under the UN flag. The 12 operations deployed today employ more than 87,000 personnel, of whom 74,329 are in uniform. All of this requires a budget, set for the period 2021-22, of approximately 6.38 billion dollars. The brief presentation we have given here serves to illustrate the magnitude of this phenomenon in the international system, as well as its complexities, which are the result of its evolution over time. In this paper we will seek to develop and describe the various trends, motivations and profiles of troop-contributing states (TCCs) over the last decades.Initially, we will briefly review the main theoretical elaborations that have been put forward on the motivations for states' participation in peace operations. In this sense, we propose a perspective based on analytical eclecticism in order to overcome the limitations of these approaches. Then, through the implementation of a qualitative case study methodology, we will focus on a view that considers the differences between mainly Northern and Global South nations, as well as the particularities presented by the main regional blocs, in both cases emphasising some significant TCCs.