Dear friends of Amani Africa,

It is certain that the 2020s would be registered in history as the most defining decade in the unravelling of the post-1945 world order. Events in 2025 both here in Africa and the world over from the emergence of a new era of insecurity and instability and African Union’s eroding influence in advancing peace and security to the collapse of development aid, the proliferation of internationalised wars fought without limits and with impunity and the replacement of principled peace-making with transactional ceasefire deals are reflections of the shifts constituting this unravelling.

While these disruptive developments are making the pursuit of multilateral diplomacy more daunting, they make it more urgent and necessary to, at least, mitigate suffering, if not to resolve the sources of such suffering. In this context, the work of institutions like Amani Africa contributing to the pursuit of multilateral diplomacy in this age of disorder is more, not less, necessary than ever before. As we also face growing constraints amidst pressing needs, we persisted in sustaining our work, through both optimising the limited, and even shrinking, resources we have and leveraging existing and new partnerships.

In this context of disorder and constraints, we focused our efforts on making our work count through catalysing sustained multilateral engagement in the most pressing conflict situations and issues through the Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the African Union (AU) in particular but not exclusively. Even when such engagement fell short of changing the fundamentals of those situations, our work contributed to its sustenance in order to keep the plight of affected populations caught in the crossfire of conflicts on the spotlight and to push against the normalisation of violent conflicts. As the outputs and results produced during 2025 attest, the work of Amani Africa also continues to serve as repository of knowledge and institutional memory and to advance transparency and enhanced understanding of AU’s policy making and Africa’s role in a changing global dynamic. At the same time, it also sought to push against and chart out ways of arresting the further erosion and risk of loss of established norms and institutional legitimacy.

The increasing attention we continued to dedicate in our work to global governance is not just as response to and about addressing the challenges posed by the unravelling world order with a particular focus on Africa. It is also in pursuit of identifying and supporting how Africa can expand the projection of its voice, including through the AU, in the thinking and working towards the transformation of the world order.

Clearly, the nature of the challenges of this era has intensified the force of the temptation to give in not just to despair but even to cynicism. Yet, these are also times for more responsibility and doubling down on the search for peace and for ending the human suffering that the unravelling occasions and contributes to. It is in this spirit that Amani Africa undertook its activities during 2025 and presents highlights of these activities in the pages that follow.

I wish to thank all of you who accompanied and supported us during 2025. May all our collective efforts open the avenues for a peaceful, prosperous and integrated Africa that is a force for good in the world!

Please read our annual report for more from the link here: https://amaniafrica-et.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Activity-Report-of-Amani-Africa-2025.pdf