UN peacekeeping is both effective and cost-effective when compared to the costs of conflict and the toll in lives and economic devastation. As an investment, UN-led peacekeeping operations—as opposed to those conducted by ad-hoc coalitions—have the distinct advantage of a built-in mechanism for globally sharing the financial, material and personnel costs, according to the research done by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler of Oxford University (1).

Historians have charted a strong inverse correlation between peacekeeping deployments and war casualties, that is, as peacekeeping goes up, war casualties go down, in both the short and long term—according to two separate recent studies by the UBC's Human Security Centre (2) and the Rand Corporation (3).

The Rand Corporation examined eight completed UN peacekeeping operations: in the Belgian Congo, Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Mozambique, Eastern Slavonia, Sierra Leone and East Timor. The study concluded that two-thirds of these were “successful.” Rand also found that the UN provides the most suitable institutional framework for all but the largest and most demanding of nation-building missions, due to the UN's comparatively low cost structure, high success rate and high degree of international legitimacy. According to this study, UN peacekeeping is a highly efficient means of placing post-conflict societies on the path to enduring peace and democratic government, and the most efficient form of international intervention so far devised. Alternatives to the UN in this field are either vastly more expensive or considerably less capable.

A study by the US Government Accountability Office estimated that it would cost the United States about twice as much as the UN to conduct a peacekeeping operation similar to the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti ­(MINUSTAH)—$876 million compared to the UN budgeted $428 million for the first 14 months of the mission (4). Other comparative advantages of UN peacekeeping cited by that study included its multinational nature, which provides impartiality and legitimacy; staff members experienced in post conflict peacebuilding operations; and a structure for coordinating international assistance.