Department of Peace Operations (DPO)

The Department of Peace Operations (DPO) is the United Nations Secretariat department responsible for the political and operational direction of UN peacekeeping missions and certain special political missions. It was established on 1 January 2019 under Secretary-General António Guterres's management reform package, which split the former Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) into DPO and the Department of Operational Support (DOS). The reform was authorized by General Assembly resolution 72/262 (July 2018), which restructured the Secretariat's peace and security pillar to eliminate duplication between peacekeeping and political affairs. DPO's mandate derives from Chapters VI, VII, and VIII of the UN Charter, and its missions are constituted by individual Security Council resolutions that define each operation's tasks, troop ceilings, and duration.

Procedurally, DPO supports the Secretary-General in implementing Security Council mandates through a chain that runs from the Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations in New York down to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) heading each field mission. When the Council adopts a peacekeeping mandate, DPO drafts the Secretary-General's implementation report (typically issued under the "S/" document series), negotiates the Status of Forces Agreement with the host state, generates forces through troop-contributing country (TCC) pledges coordinated with the Military Adviser's office, and establishes the mission's concept of operations. Force generation proceeds through the Memorandum of Understanding framework under General Assembly resolution 50/222, which governs Contingent-Owned Equipment reimbursement. Mandate renewals occur on cycles set by the Council — commonly six or twelve months — each preceded by a Secretary-General's report assessing progress against benchmarks.

DPO is organized around the Office of the Under-Secretary-General, the Office of Military Affairs (headed by the Military Adviser, a serving lieutenant-general), the Office of Rule of Law and Security Institutions (OROLSI), the Policy, Evaluation and Training Division, and regional divisions co-shared with the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) under a "single political-operational structure." This shared regional architecture — Africa I, Africa II, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, and Americas divisions — was a central innovation of the 2019 reform, ensuring that peacekeeping and special political missions in the same region report through a unified Assistant Secretary-General. DPO also manages the Standing Police Capacity based in Brindisi, Italy, and the Justice and Corrections Standing Capacity, both deployable on short notice.

Contemporary missions under DPO direction include MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, UNMISS in South Sudan, UNIFIL in Lebanon, UNDOF on the Golan Heights, UNFICYP in Cyprus, MINURSO in Western Sahara, and UNISFA in Abyei. The MINUSMA mission in Mali was terminated on 30 June 2023 following Bamako's withdrawal of consent, and MONUSCO began a phased drawdown in late 2023 at the request of the Kinshasa government. As of 2024 the Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations is Jean-Pierre Lacroix of France, a post traditionally held by a French national since the 1990s under an informal P5 distribution that also assigns the head of DPPA to an American.

DPO must be distinguished from several adjacent UN entities. The Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) leads special political missions such as UNAMA in Afghanistan and UNSMIL in Libya, focuses on preventive diplomacy and mediation, and services the Peacebuilding Commission. The Department of Operational Support (DOS) provides logistics, supply chain, human resources, and ICT to all Secretariat entities including DPO field missions, having absorbed the former Department of Field Support's functions. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is institutionally separate and responds to humanitarian rather than peace-and-security mandates. Within field missions, an SRSG may simultaneously head a peacekeeping operation reporting to DPO and coordinate humanitarian actors through the Resident Coordinator system reporting to the Development Coordination Office.

Controversies surrounding DPO concern the protection-of-civilians mandate, sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers, and host-state consent. The 2015 High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (the HIPPO report, chaired by José Ramos-Horta) urged greater primacy of politics and prevention, recommendations partially absorbed into the 2019 reform and the Secretary-General's 2018 Action for Peacekeeping (A4P) initiative and its 2021 A4P+ priorities. Performance assessment has tightened through the Comprehensive Planning and Performance Assessment System (CPAS) introduced in 2018. The withdrawal of MINUSMA, host-government hostility in the Sahel following coups in Mali (2021), Burkina Faso (2022), and Niger (2023), and the structural inability of UNIFIL to constrain Hezbollah arms flows under Security Council resolution 1701 (2006) have all generated debate about the future scope and design of UN peacekeeping.

For the working practitioner, DPO is the primary Secretariat interlocutor for any mission-related demarche: troop-contributing countries negotiate caveats and reimbursement through it; permanent missions in New York receive mandate-implementation briefings from its regional desks ahead of Council consultations; and humanitarian and development actors coordinate with its Civil Affairs and Protection of Civilians sections in theatre. Desk officers in foreign ministries with peacekeeping equities — whether contributing personnel, funding through the assessed peacekeeping budget under General Assembly resolution 73/307's scale, or hosting a mission — must understand DPO's bifurcation from DOS to route requests correctly, and its co-location with DPPA's regional divisions to engage on transitions from peacekeeping to special political missions or UN country teams.