UN peace operations budget, 1990-2017

Before 1990, that is, before the curve begins, the annual UN peacekeeping operations budget was less than 1 billion dollars – the Cold War between the two blocs meant that most attempts at peacekeeping were paralyzed. After an initial peak in the mid-1990s, when operations took place in Cambodia, Somalia, and former Yugoslavia, the budget increased during the second half of the 2000s due to the proliferation of operations in Africa. The diagram shows that in 2017-2018 several large-scale operations (usually more than 10,000 men on the ground) mobilized budgets of over 1 billion dollars (DRC, Sudan/South Sudan, and Mali).