Peacekeepers Without a Veto: India's Contribution to United Nations Peace Operations and the Politics of Global Security Governance in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

United Nations peacekeeping is usually told as a story of shared burden in the service of a common good. This paper argues that the story is better read as one of unequal exchange. Since sending a medical unit to Korea in 1950, India has supplied more personnel, absorbed more risk, and sustained its commitment more consistently than almost any other member state, yet it has done so within a system in which the states that pay the largest share of the assessed budget rarely place their own soldiers in harm's way, and the body that authorises and oversees every mission excludes India from permanent membership altogether. Drawing on United Nations data, government statements, and the scholarly literature on burden-sharing and peacekeeping politics, this paper treats India's peacekeeping record not primarily as a calculated instrument of national ascent but as a revealing case study in how the costs and the authority of international security are distributed unevenly between the Global North and the Global South. It traces this asymmetry across personnel numbers, financing, casualties, mandate design, and command structures, and asks what it would take to correct an arrangement in which the states that do the most dying supply the least deciding. It closes by considering what a more equitable peacekeeping order, rather than a more successful Indian diplomacy, would actually require.