Peacekeeper Fatalities

Peacekeeping Fatalities Open Data

Peacekeepers serve in harsh conditions and at great personal risk. Tragically some make the ultimate sacrifice. We release data in order to be transparent on the issue of fatalities.

You can analyze the data sets here and learn how the numbers of fatalities have changed over time. Note it is the responsibility of the United Nations to notify the Member State and/or next of kin when a fatality occurs. The data is updated only once this has happened. 

Definition of the data

This set includes data on fatalities in UN peacekeeping operations. It includes:

• a unique casualty identifier
• the incident date
• the mission acronym
• the type of casualty
• the ISO code associated with the country of origin of the affected personnel
• the relevant M49 DESA code
• the type of personnel involved (see below for explanation of types)
• and the type of incident

United Nations personnel: For the purpose of this dataset, United Nations personnel serving in Peacekeeping Missions and Special Political Missions in the field includes the United Nations military, police, government provided personnel (including government-provided corrections personnel and non-uniformed civilian government-provided personnel), and civilian personnel (including international civilian personnel, locally recruited civilian personnel, consultants, individual contractors*, interns, and United Nations volunteers). 

Civilian Personnel: All locally or internationally recruited civilian personnel who have contractual status with the United Nations in the mission area on appointment, assignment, or official business travel status, including international civilian staff, locally recruited civilian staff, consultants, individual contractors, interns and UNVs, serving in United Nations Peacekeeping Missions or Special Political Missions. 

Civilian staff: All international and locally-recruited civilian staff members holding a valid letter of appointment under the United Nations Staff Rules and Regulations and serving in a United Nations Peacekeeping Mission or Special Political Mission. 

Consultant: An individual serving in a United Nations Peacekeeping Mission or Special Political Mission who is engaged by the United Nations under a temporary contract in an advisory or consultative capacity. 

Government-provided Correction Personnel: Officers nominated by their governments for service with United Nations Peacekeeping Missions or Special Political Missions with the legal status of experts on mission. Government-provided corrections personnel are typically co-located with national counterparts to provide advice and technical assistance in specialized areas of correction work, including prison security; prison registries; medical and/or mental health services in prisons;  infrastructure rehabilitation; non-custodial corrections work; prison agriculture; prisoner rehabilitation and reintegration; prison inspections; and staff training design and delivery. 

Military Personnel: All military contingents and individual military officers serving in United Nations Peacekeeping Missions or Special Political Missions, including Military Liaison Officers, Military Observers and military staff officers.

Non-uniformed Civilian Government-provided Personnel: Experts nominated by their government for service with United Nations Peacekeeping Missions or Special Political Missions. They hold the legal status of “experts on mission” and provide advisory, capacity-building and mentoring support to national counterparts in specialized functions for which expertise is required that is generally only found in national government services, and are therefore most effectively drawn from Member States.   

Police Personnel: All United Nations police officers serving in United Nations Peacekeeping Missions or Special Political Missions, including Specialized Police Teams, Formed Police Units and Individual Police Officers. 

Individual contractor: An individual contractor refers to an individual serving in a United Nations Peacekeeping Mission or Special Political Mission and engaged by the United Nations from time to time under a temporary contract to provide expertise, skills or knowledge for the performance of a specific task or piece of work, which would be a short-term by nature, against the payment. An individual contractor serves in his or her individual capacity and not as a representative of any other authority external to the United Nations. Individual contractors do not include personnel provided by institutional or corporate contractors. 

Fatality: For the purposes of this dataset, fatality refers to death.

Serious injury or illness: An acute, life-threatening, medical or surgical condition that may lead to death or significant and permanent loss of limb, eyesight or function.  

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Methodology

Peacekeeping fatalities historical data starting from 1948, this data set can be used for trend analysis.

UN M.49 is a standard for area codes used by the United Nations for statistical purposes, developed and maintained by the United Nations Statistics Division. Each area code is a 3-digit number which can refer to a wide variety of geographical, political, or economic regions, like a continent, a country, or a specific group of developed or developing countries.

ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes are three-letter country codes defined in ISO 3166-1, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to represent countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest.

Relevant Links

Charts and graphs on UN Fatalities

DATA.UN.ORG

License and use

This data is being provided under the conditions outlined in the Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Tags and related terms

Casualties, peacekeeping, fatalities, missions