Amani Africa Briefing to the 1252^nd session of the Peace and Security Council on Silencing the Guns in Africa

Solomon Ayele Dersso, PhD
Founding Director, Amani Africa

Chairperson of the African Union Peace and Security Council, Ambassador Abdi Mohamoud Eyeb,

Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, Ambassador Bankole Adeoye,

Excellencies, distinguished members of the Peace and Security Council

A very good morning to you all.

It is an honor for me to address you today representing my organization Amani Africa Media and Research Services, an organization that is dedicated to the advancement of peace and security through supporting the noble mandate of this august house. our Union’s standing peace and security decision-making body.

Chairperson, Ambassador Adeoye, your excellencies members of the PSC,

I would like to commend you for dedicating today’s session for reviewing the state of implementation of African Union’s (AU) flagship project of silencing the guns.

It cannot be disputed that silencing the guns is the most pressing policy agenda of the AU that demands the utmost attention and urgent collective action of the entire African Union system under the leadership of this Council.

What informs the issues that are highlighted and the policy proposals presented in my address today are this urgency and supreme importance of achieving registering irreversible progress for silencing the guns in Africa.  In drawing attention to these issues and outlining the proposals, I will be drawing on our recent major research report titled Memo to the new AU Commission leadership from the roaring guns on AU’s first decade of silencing the guns.

Before moving further, it is important to underscore the importance of the critical role of the AU and this Council for achieving progress towards silencing the guns. Without the AU and this Council, it is not difficult to imagine how dire the peace and security situation on the continent would have been and how untenable it would have been to even conceive of silencing the guns.

As we have pointed out in our study, the state of the peace and security situation on out continent ‘makes the AU and its standing decision-making organ, the PSC, more critical than ever. With rising global geopolitical tensions and a weakened multilateral system, the effective functioning of the AU and its PSC is now a strategic imperative for Africa.’

The first key message of this major research report, a product of more than a year of research and analysis on the first ten-year of silencing the guns, is that silencing the guns is more deeply pressing today than a decade ago when it was adopted.

Despite the efforts of the AU and various AU stakeholders and the progress registered in some cases, our report established that conflicts and crises have shown exponential increase during the decade since the launch of Silencing the Guns in Africa. Our analysis of the number of conflict situations on the agenda of the PSC during the decade since 2013 highlighted the increase in conflict and crisis situations in Africa by nearly threefold. This is further substantiated by our analysis of global conflict datasets, which adduce data showing the alarming spike in conflict events on the continent, with the compound annual growth rate of conflicts in Africa at a staggering 9.6%. While the level of increase is not the same, our study established that the increase is across conflict types, including state-based conflicts, one-sided conflicts, non-state conflicts and internationalised conflicts.

Not only has the number of conflicts alarmingly increased, but their geographic spread and humanitarian and socio-economic impacts have also exploded. Many more territories on the continent are affected by conflicts and crises today than when silencing the guns was launched. The number of people that bear the brunt of wars and crises on the continent has increased by many folds during the past ten years and reached a level larger than the highest number of people affected by conflict during the past six decades in absolute terms. Beyond and above the large number of lives these conflicts have claimed and displacements they have precipitated, Africa has lost enormous resources and treasures to the devastating impacts of these conflicts.

As our report put it, these conditions turned the first ten years of silencing the guns into the years of the roaring guns. The increase in the number of conflicts, their geographic spread and the severity of their impacts are making a mockery of AU’s agenda of STGs. There is no clear sign of this state of affairs changing as the AU embarked on the second phase of the STGs. The various sources of data and the accompanying analysis suggest that the approach to STGs pursued during the first ten-year period had largely failed. In his address to the opening session of the 37th Ordinary Session of the AU Assembly of Heads of State and Government on 17 February 2024, the AU Commission Chairperson candidly painted the grim state of the situation when asking, ‘How should we stop watching terrorism ravage some of our countries, without doing anything? How can we accept just watching African countries destroyed, entire Regions engulfed by tremours and Tsunamis, without doing anything significant?’

Our conclusion, excellencies from this bleak picture is not that silencing the guns is doomed. Nor is that we should give up on the agenda of silencing the guns.

Our conclusion is that the nature and scale of conflicts in some of the regions affected by these conflicts is such that they pose existential threat to the affected peoples and countries. This is particularly true today in the countries of the Sahel affected by conflicts involving terrorist groups and in Sudan.

Our conclusion is that the increase in the number of conflicts and the scale and consequences of the conflicts and crises has reached emergency levels. We are not being hyperbolic in making this assertion. It is how those affected experience these conditions.

Our conclusion is that the business-as-usual approach to peace and security adopted thus far in pursuing the goal of silencing the guns is not working.

Our conclusion is that STGs has to entail a more effective mobilisation of collective action for ending violent conflicts and preventing the eruption of new ones in order to register irreversible progress towards silencing the guns by 2030.

Our conclusion is that targeted policy action must be deployed in two ways: one for resolving ongoing violent conflicts and another for preventing the risks of eruption of new conflicts or relapse back to conflicts.

Excellencies,

Against this background, we outline below some of the recommendations distilled from our report:

1. There is a need for a strategic review of the situation on the continent and the issues impeding the effective role of the AU and the APSA in pursuing the agenda of STGs. Such a strategic review should be one of the priorities of the AU for 2025, and it is our submission that such a review should be accompanied by a special summit of the AU under the new leadership of the AU Commission.
2. The PSC needs to designate the most serious conflict situations as reaching emergency levels and constituting existential threats to the affected peoples and states. This is particularly true with respect to conflicts in the Sahel and Sudan. This necessitates the establishment of an emergency situation room dedicated to these situations with a high-level task force with the responsibility for mobilising response measures that involve a mix of stabilisation, peace enforcement and peacebuilding capacities that leverage and are deployed along with livelihood supporting and economic opportunity enhancing development interventions as well as negotiation, mediation and reconciliation.
3. The PSC needs to call for the development of a conflict management and resolution strategy tailored to each conflict situation backed by the requisite technical, diplomatic and financial resources. The strategy needs not only to ensure the design and use of conflict resolution tools tailored to the specificities of each conflict situation informed by such strategy but also to provide guidance on the means and methods of ensuring the effectiveness of the use of such tools.
4. There is a need to pay increasing attention to inter-communal conflicts that constitute the majority of non-state conflicts in Africa. This necessitates enhancing the development and use of peace and security tools tailored to addressing such non-state conflicts. Of interest in this respect is the need for enhancing the mapping of intercommunal conflicts and their trends through the Continental Early Warning system. It also necessitates the enhanced use of interventions that target the impacts of climate change, enhance peaceful dispute resolution mechanisms between diverse communities and deliver livelihood-enhancing and other adaptation and resilience-enhancing support.
5. There is clearly a need for a much forceful and proactive approach to conflict prevention if new conflicts are to be presented from erupting. This entails that the AU and RECs/RMs as well as international organizations such as the UN and partners are able to effectively map situations that face risks of violent conflict and initiate timely policy intervention to prevent such risks from materializing.
6. There is also a need to reinvigorate the use of AU-led peace support operations on the basis of the ASF. Since the deployment of the last major AU-led peace support operations in CAR and Mali, a vacuum has emerged, leading to the proliferation of ad hoc missions which are not fully anchored on the APSA and have the unintended consequence of undermining the use of AU-led peace support operations. Accordingly, AU needs to assert its leadership role in deploying peace support operations as it did some years back and leverage Resolution 2719, which affirms AU’s leadership role in peace support operations.
7. We also propose foregrounding political solutions and diplomacy as the primary means of silencing the guns and thus addressing the governance and institutional fragilities and weaknesses that create the conditions both for the expansion of the terrorist threat on the continent and the eruption of violent conflicts. The PSC and the AU need to reinvigorate the primacy of diplomacy and, to this end, call for the development and implementation of a strategy that clearly establishes the range of AU diplomatic instruments and, bolsters their effectiveness and enhances their use as primary means of advancing peace and security and pursuing silencing the guns.
8. The PSC may call for the development of guidelines on negotiation and dialogue for peace in conflict situations involving terrorist groups. Currently, the use of such peace and security tools (negotiation and dialogue) is frowned upon due to the exclusion of such tools in the context of the global war against terrorism. There is now a recognition that an approach that excludes negotiation and dialogue does not yield success. As such, the guidelines that the AU develops, using its well-established norm development role, help in providing guidance on how to pursue negotiation and dialogue with terrorist groups with regard to the delicate issue of de-radicalization, accountability for and reconciliation with affected members of communities.
9. The PSC and the AU broadly ill afford to continue the current path of sustaining the bare minimum of their functions and increasingly contested credibility. The PSC and the AU need to reinvigorate the assumption of their leadership role in not only outlining well-grounded political solutions for the resolution of conflicts but also in mobilising the level of consensus and support from member states and other key stakeholders necessary for advancing the implementation of such political solutions supported by relevant peace and security instruments of the APSA.