The challenges that are currently facing UN peacekeeping are immense. Over the past few years, the international community witnessed a major surge in demand for United Nations peace operations. New complex and multidimensional missions, massive deployments of military and civilian personnel and charges of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers have challenged the Organization as never before. But the surge in demand has also clearly demonstrated that countries emerging from conflicts need United Nations assistance and reflected the confidence of Member States in UN peacekeeping as the right tool to handle these difficult tasks.

The United Nations has continued to provide support to stabilize fragile peace agreements and assist political transition processes. In 2005 alone, the UN supported the organization of elections in four post-conflict countries: Afghanistan, Burundi, Haiti, Liberia, while also providing technical expertise for elections in Iraq. In 2006, elections are scheduled in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the United Nations currently deploys its largest mission.

The United Nations has responded to evolving, complex situations in Côte d’Ivoire, Burundi, Georgia, the Middle East, Kosovo and the Sudan; and provided robust, responsive peacekeeping in areas such as in the eastern DRC and in city districts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2005, the Organization completed its peacekeeping mandates in Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste and established UN peacebuilding support missions there (UNIOSIL and UNOTIL respectively) to help those countries in the transition to longer-term stability and peacebuilding

In May 2006, the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations was directing 18 peace operations across the world (including 15 peacekeeping operations and three special political missions), comprising about 89,000 troops, police and civilian personnel. This represented more than a five-fold increase in field personnel since 2000, and an increase of almost 10,000 personnel since May 2005 and more than 22,000 since May 2004. Other than the United States, the UN has the largest number of military forces deployed in the world.

Those operations have directly affected over 200 million men, women and children whose lives have been torn apart by the scourge of war. The UN, through its Department of Political Affairs (DPA), also supports eight other special political or peacebuilding missions and offices around the world.

Although the United Nations, as a result of the Brahimi process, has consistently improved its capacity to support operations and to plan for new ones, the new ballooning demands have tested the UN's peacekeeping capacity as never before and have required substantial additional resources and another look at how the United Nations runs its peace operations.

The situation has further been complicated by the fact that several of the world's most capable militaries and strong economies are either heavily committed—mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan—or for other reasons, such as reduced defense spending, are choosing not to contribute troops to UN peacekeeping. Meanwhile, the UN's top 10 troop contributors to peacekeeping operations are developing countries and have limited resources.