UNDOF and the Limits of Peacekeeping Reform: Persistence Without Evolution

The United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) has monitored the 1974 Israel–Syria disengagement regime on the Golan Heights for half a century. Its narrow mandate persists largely unchanged despite a profound transformation of its operating environment during and after the Syrian civil war. This article asks why UNDOF endures in its original form, and what its persistence reveals about the limits of contemporary peacekeeping reform. Drawing on the Secretary-General's reporting from 2015 to 2025, it traces how the Syrian state's collapse, non-state armed actors, and Israeli operations inside the area of separation eroded the original regime, culminating in the December 2024 Israeli incursion. To explain why the mission persists yet does not adapt, the article develops the concept of a negative-consensus equilibrium, sustained by institutional inertia, signalling value, and juridical lock-in, and specifies the scope conditions under which it emerges in treaty-bound missions. It then tests the 2025 Berlin Peacekeeping Ministerial's reform agenda against the case, arguing that its core commitments each fail for a different reason: modularity, because the mandate lies beyond the Council's reach; political primacy, because the parties withhold consent; and performance accountability, because the equilibrium decouples fate from results.