Analysis · 2026-09-03

Who actually keeps the peace

The states supplying UN peacekeepers are almost none of the states holding the vetoes -- and how many of them are women depends far more on the job than on the country.

In 2026-05, the most recent month the UN Peace and Security Data Hub reports, 45,463 uniformed personnel were deployed to 18 UN missions, sent by 118 member states. The ten largest contributors are these.

The list is worth reading against the one on the veto record. The states that decide what the Council may do, and the states that put people on the ground when it decides something, are almost entirely different sets of states. Of the five permanent members, one appears above.

Women in peacekeeping is a question about roles, not about countries

Across all contributors, 10.0 per cent of deployed personnel are women. That single figure hides almost everything interesting, because the share varies by a factor of several depending on which job is being counted.

Individual Police is 35.1 per cent women; Troops is 7.9 per cent. Those are the two ends of the same deployment, in the same month, under the same policy. The pattern that runs between them is that the further a role sits from soldiering and the closer it sits to policing or expertise, the more women are in it — and troops are much the largest category, which is why the overall figure lands where it does.

That matters for how the target is read. The UN’s uniformed gender parity strategy sets separate targets for troops, police and staff officers precisely because they are different labour markets, drawing on different national institutions. A single headline percentage for “women in peacekeeping” averages across armies and police services that look nothing alike, and it moves mostly when the mix of missions changes.

Every contributor, month by month