African Union risks betraying the raison d’être of its existence, bequeathing a fragmented continent burdened with conflicts
African Union risks betraying the raison d’être of its existence, bequeathing a fragmented continent burdened with conflictsDate | 15 September 2025
Solomon Ayele Dersso, PhD
Founding Director, Amani Africa
Tefesehet Hailu
Researcher, Amani Africa
On the 9th of September, the African Union (AU) commemorated the annual AU Day. Similar to the United Nations, ‘good cheer’ is in short supply on this anniversary of the continental body, despite some of its past successes.
The AU is in crisis. Nothing more highlights this crisis than its increasing loss of leadership in peace and security. There is nothing more central to the mandate of the Peace and Security Council (PSC) and the AU than Silencing the Guns. It constitutes the raison d’être for the very existence of this Council and indeed for the AU itself.
Like the UN, peace and security constitutes the principal pillar of the AU. The UN was founded, as outlined in the preamble to the UN Charter, principally to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’ The Constitutive Act of the AU in its Preamble also stipulates that the AU is founded ‘conscious of the fact that the scourge of conflicts in Africa constitutes a major impediment to the socio-economic development of the continent.’ It further states that the founders of the AU were cognizant ‘of the need to promote peace, security and stability as a prerequisite for the implementation of our development and integration agenda.’
The ambition of the AU with respect to peace and security went beyond its consideration of peace as a precondition for development and continental integration. In May 2013, at the 50th anniversary of the OAU/AU, the Solemn Declaration that African leaders adopted in Addis Ababa made the unprecedented pledge of ‘not to bequeath the burden of conflict to the next generation of Africans and undertake to end all wars by 2020.’
While the commitment not to bequeath the burden of conflict to the next generation echoes the UN Charter’s pledge of ‘saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war’, the AU went further. It pledged to rid the continent of wars and conflicts within a short period of time. African leaders thus committed ‘to achieve the goal of a conflict-free Africa, to make peace a reality for all our people and to rid the continent of wars, civil conflicts, human rights violations, humanitarian disasters and violent conflicts and to prevent genocide.’ (emphasis added)
Given the continent’s painful experience with wars and conflicts of various kinds, this commitment to and ambition for silencing the guns is both understandable and hugely deserving. The persistence of violent conflicts across the various regions of the continent and the plight of millions of people caught up in the crossfire of these conflicts attest that the imperative of silencing the guns cannot be overemphasised.
Indeed, during the first decade of its existence and the early years of the 2010s, the AU assumed an increasing role and established its leadership in peace and security on the continent, contributing to a decline in conflicts. It deployed various peacemaking and peacekeeping instruments in various conflict settings, including Burundi, Darfur, South Sudan, Sudan, Somalia and later the Central African Republic and Mali. Its relatively consistent enforcement of its anti-coup norm contributed to the decline in the recurrence of coups.
In recent years, a new troubling trend has set in. Coups have made a comeback. There were over a dozen successful and attempted coups during the first ten years of the STGs, as the graph below shows.
As shown in the graphs below, conflicts also proliferated alarmingly. Our signature annual report reviewing the peace and security landscape and the role of the AU warned that with many concerning peace and security trends of the continent becoming prominent and stark, further accentuated by additional continental and global developments in 2024, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the continent is entering a new era of insecurity and instability.’
As William Ruto, Kenya’s President and Champion of the Institutional Reform of the AU, pointed out in his report to the AU Assembly in February 2025, the ‘dire peace and security situation in Africa partly indicts the continent’s peace architecture.’ From the resurgent coups to the spiraling conflicts, AU has not been able to muster the kind of action able to arrest these trends or change the course of events in these conflict or crisis settings as the situation in Sudan attests.
Despite the Solemn Declaration of AU leaders to rid Africa of conflicts by 2020, when the 2020 deadline arrived, the AU was no closer to achieving this objective. Instead of falling silent, the sound of guns has grown louder than at any other time before. In 2020, not only did the AU not see the end of conflicts, but it was unable to do more than convening of ritualized meetings and adoption of communiqués or statements with little impacts as conflicts proliferated and atrocities perpetrated.
An independent study reviewing the first ten-year implementation of the STGs produced recently revealed this grim picture. From Sudan to DRC, from Mozambique to the Sahel, Ethiopia and South Sudan, the peace and security situation of the continent has deteriorated exponentially. As the study put it, the first ten years of the STGs turned out to be the ‘years of the roaring guns.’
The analysis of the data of conflict/crises situations on the agenda of the PSC established that the number of conflicts has increased during the first ten years of the STG by more than two-fold.
It is ‘as if Africa went from the frying pan to the fire.’ Since 2013, Africa has witnessed not only a persistent increment in the number of conflicts but also the expansion in their geographic spread. Even after the December 2020, 14th extraordinary summit of the AU that decided to extend the timeline for realising the STGs by a decade, this deteriorated peace and security situaiton persisted.
Not only did conflicts and crises proliferate, but their human cost reached unprecedented levels. Despite AU’s celebrated norm of non-indifference, ‘[a]gain and again’ seems to have taken the place of ‘never again’ to mass atrocities. The scale and nature of atrocities registered particularly during the past half a decade have no parallels beyond the early 1990s. Fatalities from conflicts, particularly those involving the state, show a dramatic surge, reaching a peak from 2020, as the graph below shows.
The AU came to be found wanting in delivering on the pledge not to bequeath wars to the next generation. It is true that it was not all doom and gloom. Some notable gains have been registered in terms of ‘ending’ some conflicts, such as South Sudan and Ethiopia, as well as preventing a few others. These isolated gains notwithstanding, the overall trend is one of a downward spiral. As the study referenced above observed, there are more conflicts that have further deteriorated, expanded and newly erupted than those resolved or prevented.
The AU is now halfway through the 2030 target for silencing the guns. Yet, the situation on the continent is not any better than it was in 2020, let alone in 2013. In total contrast to the 2013 pledge of African leaders, various parts of the continent remain encumbered with ‘wars, civil conflicts, human rights violations, humanitarian disasters and violent conflicts and acts amounting to genocide.’ The AU is thus risking betraying the raison d’être of its existence, bequeathing a fragmented continent burdened with conflicts.
With the AU falling behind the curve and hence reacting belatedly and often ineffectively, particularly after Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma’s tenure at the helm of the AU Commission, peace and security initiatives have increasingly become regional and ad hoc. From Lesotho and Mozambique to Eastern DRC, from Lake Chad basin to the Sahel, AU’s leadership role was replaced by those of regional organisations or ad hoc coalitions. Thus, despite the increase in deployment of peace enforcement heavy peace operations since 2015, none of these were led by the AU, as the graph below capturing all AU mandated or endorsed missions attests.
Perhaps more poignantly, the AU seems to be losing the initiative and the space for peace and security leadership to external actors. Instead of Addis Ababa, major initiatives for ceasefire or peacemaking for conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia-Somalia and Eastern DRC are coming from Jeddah, Washington DC, Ankara, and Doha.
No doubt, the resultant crisis of both relevance and credibility facing the continental body is a product of various factors. Resources, capacity and geopolitical constraints as well as lack of political will. However, similar to the UN, the main factor that accounts for this state of affair of the AU is the erosion of its peace and security leadership.
The pan-African body has to rediscover the courage and ability to exercise leadership and restore its relevance and credibility to avoid the collapse of the nascent Pax Africana anchored on the PSC. With the new AU Commission leadership in place and the launch of the review of AU’s governance and peace and security architecture early this month, there is ample opportunity for accomplishing this.
This rediscovery requires the reassertion of the resolve and willingness of the AU and its leaders to imagine, seek and craft political solutions tailored to specific conflict or crisis situations, early enough. The ability to serve as the leading platform for negotiating and crafting such solutions, and bring together and nudge conflict parties towards such solutions, leveraging its norms and foregrounding the use of the instruments of persuasion and stubborn persistence. The diplomatic astuteness and creativity to build consensus around and enlist broad and solid continental and international support for the political solutions thus crafted.
The AU, as an embodiment of the aspirations and hope of Africans and peoples of African descent, worth creating if it did not exist, has to resuscitate its leadership role fast. This is also an existential imperative for repositioning Africa and the Union for the realities of a profoundly changing global order that is replete with serious perils, despite some opportunities.
The content of this article does not represent the views of Amani Africa and reflect only the personal views of the authors who contribute to ‘Ideas Indaba’