The 2025–26 UN Peacekeeping Cuts and the Countries That Supply the Troops: Evidence from Monthly Deployment Data

In October 2025, short of cash because member states had not paid their contributions in full, the United Nations told its peacekeeping missions to cut spending by 15 percent, which meant sending home about a quarter of its uniformed personnel. Using the UN's monthly records by country and mission, I measure who bore the cut, in people and in the payments the UN owes contributing governments at its standard rate of USD 1,448 per person per month. Between June 2025 and July 2026, uniformed personnel fell by 16,480, or 26.9 percent, and the payments owed fell by USD 259.6 million a year. The four largest missions were each cut by 24.5 to 33.3 percent, so the missions a country served in explain little of how much it lost. Instead, in tests set out in an analysis plan written before they were run, the cut fell harder on the countries most dependent on UN payments: a tenfold higher ratio of payments to military spending went with a cut about 4.6 percentage points larger, two-thirds of it within the same missions. Relative to military budgets the loss was concentrated: Rwanda's lost payments equal 17.4 percent of its 2024 military spending, Nepal's 7.1 percent and Ghana's 4.2 percent. The gradient holds from a later baseline and does not appear in the 13 months before the cut, but it rests on the large contingents, loses precision without the missions whose reductions the Security Council decided separately, and within missions is not significant with standard errors clustered by mission.