Your work as peacekeepers is complicated and diverse: rebuilding societies wracked by violence; ensuring peaceful, fair elections; and maintaining calm in some of the tensest situations on Earth. You face the daunting tasks of convincing armed groups to lay down their weapons and restoring the lives of thousands of children forced to become soldiers during war. You create the conditions to bring warring parties to the negotiating table—resulting in an amazing 172 ceasefires, peace accords, and power-sharing agreements since 1945. You remove hundred of thousands of mines from war zones all over the world, allowing communities to return home and rebuild their lives.

Your 60 years of hard work to bring peace to the world has produced extraordinary outcomes for millions of people.

We all have a vital stake in the work that you do. Individual governments simply cannot afford to—nor would be advised to—send their own troops to all of the places where you are deployed. With a budget of just $8 billion annually, you operate in harsh climates to resolve seemingly intractable conflicts—building roads and bridges, building hospitals and schools, building up entire societies, but most importantly, building hope and trust that peace can emerge, endure, and even thrive everywhere you are deployed.

Thousands of you—from 119 countries across the world—have given your life in the service of pursuing peace. Your work is heroic, and on behalf of all of those who have benefited, directly or indirectly, from 60 years of UN peacekeeping: THANK YOU.

Sincerely,

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