U.S. Military Humanitarianism and the United Nations

Abstract

While the United Nations (U.N.) is typically seen as a major humanitarian actor—that is, an organization committed to alleviating human suffering and improving human welfare, it is not often thought of as a military power. But that is one of the many functions that the U.N. has adopted since its origin in 1945. For over seventy years, the U.N. Secretariat—the international bureaucracy responsible for the U.N. organization's executive and administrative functions—has conducted long-term expeditionary military operations across the globe in the form of peacekeeping and observer missions. The military wing of U.N. operations has only continued to grow in the twenty-first century. As of July 2023, 87,544 peacekeepers were deployed on active operations. And that number is lower than in the recent past, down from a height of 107,805 in April 2015.1 During that time, only the United States has regularly maintained more foreign-deployed forces than the U.N.