UN peacekeeping in Africa is on the decline. In 2023, Mali’s military junta requested the withdrawal of MINUSMA, the country’s UN peacekeeping operation in place since 2013. The same year, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) president Félix Tshisekedi requested an accelerated drawdown of his country’s UN mission, MONUSCO, stating that it had failed to achieve its goals. (Unlike in Mali, the DRC’s withdrawal has been phased; while MONUSCO has withdrawn from some areas, the mission will remain active in the country’s conflict-afflicted eastern provinces through at least December 2026).
To be sure, there are plenty of good reasons to criticize UN peacekeeping missions, which are often far from fluent in local knowledge, resources, and values. According to the International Crisis Group, “UN contingents often lack the situational awareness, military resources and willingness to take risks required to prevent attacks on the people they were supposed to shield.”
The scope of UN mandates—which includes preventing and stabilizing conflicts, promoting human rights, and strengthening institutions—has been criticized for being too wide to be implemented in short order (or at all). And the long-term outsourcing of these tasks to foreign actors can make it more difficult for countries to develop autonomy over their own security mechanisms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there have been deep frustrations in countries with missions in place. In August 2023, at least 43 people were killed and 53 injured in interactions with law enforcement at an anti-UN protest in the DRC.
However, there are plenty of reasons to believe that what is emerging after these withdrawals—a patchwork of regional forces, state-backed contractors, and private security firms—may be worse.
Despite UN peacekeeping’s problems, political scientists have consistently found that “all else equal, countries and regions that receive peacekeeping missions experience less armed conflict, fewer civilian and combatant deaths, fewer mass killings, longer periods of post-conflict peace, and fewer repeat wars than those that do not receive peacekeepers.” When wrongdoing occurs, the centralized nature of UN peacekeeping mechanisms makes it easier to document and report violations.
Now, as these peacekeeping missions wind down, what is replacing them is often not local security ownership—despite governments’ stated goals—but instead a fragmented landscape in which state-mandated regional forces operate alongside foreign-backed contractors with opaque chains of command and ad hoc militias seeking quick results. As peacekeepers leave, power is often being handed to combatants instead. This fragmented network complicates oversight and produces a security ecosystem often motivated by politics, profit, and combat success instead of long-term peace goals. Under this new regime, the basic values that motivate UN peacekeeping missions — consent, impartiality, and highly limited use of force — risk being sidelined.
In 2021, fueled by frustration with UN peacekeeping and past support from former colonial ruler France, Mali’s junta government turned to Russian mercenaries — first under the aegis of the Wagner Group, then eventually its successor Africa Corps — to fight jihadist groups. These forces have repeatedly been accused of indiscriminate killings and serious human rights violations. According to Human Rights Watch, since May 2024, members of the Wagner Group working with Malian armed forces have deliberately killed at least 32 people, disappeared four more, and burned at least 100 homes. “Civilian populations are now more scared of being arrested and killed by Wagner than jihadist and other armed groups,” Héni Nsaibia, a West Africa analyst, said in an interview with the New York Times.
In the DRC, where Russian mercenary forces have not played a significant role thus far, a similarly fractured security ecosystem is emerging to combat the Rwandan-backed rebel militia known as M23. In 2022, President Tshisekedi asked the seven member states of the East African Community (EAC) to deploy a supplementary force to the eastern DRC. Just 11 months later, they were ordered to leave after Tshisekedi derided their “lack of effectiveness.”
In 2023, Tshisekedi engaged troops from the Southern African Development Community, but terminated that mandate just over a year later as well.
The government has also brought in private firms, including Agemira, a small French-led intelligence and logistics operation, as well as a military outfit led by Horațiu Potra, a Romanian-French mercenary who cut his teeth providing security for politicians and mining operations across the continent. His group, sometimes called “the Romeos,” were a motley crew which included army and police officers, Potra’s own friends, and even untrained supermarket guards. After their failure in early 2025 to prevent the eastern city of Goma from being captured by M23 forces, many of the Romeos were escorted to the Rwandan border to be repatriated.
In addition, President Tshisekedi has called for the formation of local civilian militias and provided them with government support. Such groups, by nature, are often loosely organized and only nominally answerable to the state. This May, Human Rights Watch accused members of these groups of committing “widespread abuses against civilians.”
These trends aren’t just playing out in Mali and the DRC. Across swaths of the continent, the security ecosystem is becoming more fragmented, privatized, and dangerous for civilians. While it is difficult to estimate the number of active private security forces given the secretive nature in which many operate, many instances of human rights abuses related to these groups have been reported, including in Mozambique, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and more.
Importantly, when security becomes privatized, civilian safety becomes increasingly entangled with economic interests, a model that can blur the line between protection and exploitation. The Wagner Group, for instance, has repeatedly been accused of providing security in exchange for resource concessions.
Instead of being grounded in normative human rights values, a privatized security ecosystem risks creating a de facto “market for peace,” one that privileges economic incentives over the inherent value of human life.
Nonbinding discussions are underway in the African Union to update their 1977 convention against mercenarism to include more stringent human rights monitoring and stricter punishments for countries that employ foreign security groups. But the deeper threat here is the collapse of the collective ideals that once underpinned global crisis response. UN peacekeeping was far from perfect — its goals were frequently compromised in practice. But it nevertheless rested on a shared (if inconsistently applied) commitment to civilian protection, human rights, and an international responsibility to prevent mass violence. When peacekeeping operates according to contractual obligations instead of universal principles, civilians become clients at best, and collateral damage at worst.
Importantly, it’s not just privatization that can harm civilian interests. Even if regional forces or local militias work to fill in the gaps instead, the fragmentation of the security ecosystem into a disorganized tangle of actors with differing mandates and political motivations risks weakening its architecture and complicating the process of redress when abuses are committed.
And the more this fragmentation persists, the more difficult it may become for governments to take meaningful ownership over their own security interests — the very grievance which many UN peacekeeping detractors point to as a reason missions should withdraw. The current patchwork may be filling immediate gaps in some cases, but it risks entrenching the structural weaknesses it purports to resolve.
Countries should move away from long-term reliance on UN peacekeepers and toward local ownership over security mechanisms. But that transition cannot come at the cost of human rights, universal accountability, and long-term peacekeeping goals (which remain distinct from short-term counterinsurgency goals). These are principles that, if lost in the handover, may be much more difficult to rebuild later on.
