El-Ghassim Wane

Africa today faces not simply a difficult moment, but a structural turning point. The issue is not whether the world is becoming more unstable and messy — it clearly is. The real question is: What does a disorderly world mean for African security?

My core argument is straightforward: The erosion of the global order is transforming Pan-Africanism from a political aspiration into a security imperative.

Let me start with few remarks on the changing global environment and why this matters specifically for Africa.

Many of the trends now worrying the world are not new to Africans and to the Global South more broadly. For decades, stakeholders in the Global South warned about selective application of international law, unilateral action, and power politics.

For Africa, this carries a host of consequences.

First, frequent violations of international law and the increasing use of coercion, including force, in pursuit of national interests affect all states, but weaker states are affected more severely. African countries depend disproportionately on rules because they lack comparable hard power. When rules weaken, their vulnerability increases.

Second, while the current multilateral system is imperfect and unbalanced — and was designed with very little African input — it has nonetheless provided some clear advantages: coalition-building, forums to address global challenges, mediation frameworks, peacekeeping operations. As multilateralism weakens, Africa loses diplomatic leverage to advance its interests and conflict-management tools simultaneously.

Third, declining external support is not just a development issue. It is a security issue. Peace operations, DDR programmes, elections support, humanitarian assistance and even state administration in some fragile states have depended heavily on external financing.

Fourth, with heightened geopolitical competition inside Africa, the continent’s conflicts are becoming increasingly internationalized (see also here). External actors increasingly shape battlefield dynamics, while African institutions struggle to influence outcomes.

Clearly, Africa is entering a period in which it is more exposed to instability while simultaneously losing the external mechanisms that had so far contributed to manage instability. In other words, the trends described earlier do not merely create a more dangerous world — they remove the external pillars that helped African mechanisms function.

It is important here to keep in mind that Africa’s conflict management system was designed as part of a cooperative international security framework — one only needs to look at the provisions of the Peace and Security Council Protocol, especially those concerning its relationship with the United Nations and other international partners. That framework is now less predictable, less available and, in some cases, internally divided.

This raises an important question: Can African institutions maintain stability if external stabilisers become inconsistent or absent? That is the crossroads Africa is now approaching — not a philosophical choice about Pan-Africanism, but a practical challenge of collective security.

Pan-Africanism has often been treated as history, memory, or political sentiment. Today it is becoming a functional necessity. In many ways, this vindicates Kwame Nkrumah. In the early 1960s, he argued that unity was not primarily ideological — it was a condition for sovereignty in an unequal international system.

Howard French, the author of the book Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War and of the more recent book The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide, captures this well. He writes: ‘With no one in the world serving up favors to the continent, Nkrumah’s insight about the gains to be had through federation is as salient as ever. What is lacking is sufficient action. The time has come for a continent cut loose in the world to take the next step.’

And this is precisely the issue. At the very moment when the international environment is becoming more hostile, African states are not acting with the level of collective cohesion that the situation requires. And more broadly, we see a weakening reflex of continental solidarity.

The result is predictable: fragmented bargaining power, unequal deals, and diminished leverage (see also here). In peace and security, this situation also complicates the search for lasting solutions that require engagement within a coherent continental framework.

Against this backdrop, what collective security actually requires in practice?

The starting point is simple: unity is no longer an emotional or rhetorical ideal. It is strategic necessity. It determines the continent’s negotiating power, its ability to manage conflicts, and ultimately its political survival in a more competitive international environment.

So what does that mean concretely for African countries?

First, it entails deepening our collective investment in the institutions we have created. Our leaders cannot be more present at summits with external partners than at AU meetings. That sends a message — to others and to ourselves. As Désiré Assogbavi recently remarked, ‘As the world order shifts, summits in foreign capitals make the continent look like a guest at its own table.’

Second, it means cooperating fully with African conflict-management institutions. Africa already has one of the most elaborate peace and security architectures in the world: norms, institutions and expertise exist. The PSC Protocol is explicit — Member States are expected to support and cooperate with African efforts to resolve conflicts. This does not mean excluding external partners. Our crises are connected to global dynamics. But external support must reinforce African leadership, not replace it.

Third, it means honoring a commitment our leaders themselves made at the launch of the Peace and Security Council in May 2004: No African conflict should be ‘out of bounds’ for the AU, and when grave abuses occur ‘Africa should be the first to speak and the first to act.’ If we do not act when crises unfold on the continent, we should not be surprised when others step in.

Fourth, collective security does not mean isolation. It requires close partnership with the United Nations and other international stakeholders. Already in 1990, Salim Ahmed Salim, then OAU Secretary-General, argued that while Africa must strengthen its ‘inner strength’, it should continue to prioritize the UN as the principal multilateral forum through which it defends its interests internationally. That remains true today. Africa should be at the forefront of efforts to reinforce the UN and make it more fit for purpose.

Finally, collective security is also a question of responsibility. Everyone in the AU ecosystem — governments, institutions, and officials — must recognize the seriousness of the moment. Africa is entering a more demanding international environment. Routine approaches will not suffice (see here). This period requires commitment, discipline and steadfastness.

How, then, do we operationalize this ambition? What role should the AU Commission play in moving it forward ?

Stronger political commitment will clearly be required. At present, the level of collective resolve does not fully match the demands of the moment. This is a reality we must acknowledge.

But paradoxically, this makes the role of the AU Commission — which is not only an administrative body (the Constitutive Act, the PSC Protocol and several other instruments are clear in this respect) — more important, not less. Political will does not simply appear. It has to be generated, encouraged, nurtured.

In periods of geopolitical transition, tensions among Member States and inward-looking approaches as countries focus primarily on their domestic challenges, institutions matter more than ever. The Commission must act as the engine of collective action. It must engage proactively, build coalitions around sensitive issues, and create the conditions in which states feel both empowered and compelled to act.

To conclude, the world is becoming more dangerous and less structured. For Africa, the consequence is clear: external stabilizers are weakening at a time of rising internal vulnerabilities. Therefore, the question before us is not ideological. It is whether African states will face insecurity individually or manage it collectively.

Pan-Africanism, in this context, is about survival and agency. Africa can either become an arena where global competition plays out or an organized actor capable of shaping its own security environment. The decisions taken in the period ahead will determine which of the two it becomes.

Abdul Mohammed, Senior Fellow at Amani Africa and Former Senior UN Official and Chief of Staff of AU High-level Panel on Sudan

 

We are living through a rupture in the global order.

This is not a passing crisis, a cyclical downturn, or a temporary disruption. It is a rupture—moral, political, institutional, and ideological. The assumptions that governed global life for decades are not merely eroding; they are being openly repudiated. Power is no longer cloaked in the language of universal values. It is asserted through identity, exclusion, hierarchy, and fear.

This rupture is not abstract. It is already reshaping how the world organizes power, mobility, security, and value. Within this context, Africa now confronts a new scramble—quieter than the colonial past, but no less consequential.

The United States’ 2025 National Security Strategy’ illustrates this shift. It reads less like a traditional security document and more like a civilizational manifesto. Its central anxiety is not war, climate collapse, or nuclear escalation—but migration. Immigration is framed not as a policy challenge, but as a civilizational threat. A racialized fear is projected outward onto the world.

Stopping migration has become doctrine—exported through alliances, embedded in diplomacy, and enforced far beyond American borders. This is not simply border control; it is population control by proxy. Collective security is mocked. International cooperation is belittled. Global public goods are treated as illusions. Multilateralism itself is recast as a shackle—an obstacle to the exercise of raw power.

From certain capitals, this may appear to be a return to classical geostrategy, in which the world is divided into spheres of influence. Across the global South, however, it evokes something more familiar. Colonialism was geo-kleptocracy.

Those who witnessed Apartheid and its ‘homelands‘—low-wage reservoirs designed for extraction—will recognize the pattern. Stealing countries was the ultimate form of global kleptocracy.

For Africa, this shift is existential.

A century and a half ago, the continent was carved up by imperial powers who treated sovereignty as a commodity to be sliced, ranked, and traded. Aborting the organic process of the forming of indigenous political entities, this process produced the most arbitrarily contrived fragments in the service of colonial powers. This bequeathed Africa administrative shells designed for extraction, not autonomy.

The leaders of independence believed they had won the political kingdom. Yet when they took control of their new capitals, they discovered that the structures they inherited were little more than fortified trading posts—designed to serve the interest of the metropole and for stifling strategic autonomy and self-determination.

Africa’s agency has therefore never rested in the nation-state alone. It has rested in collective action. In Pan-Africanism.

Thus viewed, Pan-Africanism is not nostalgia. It is political technology for survival in a hostile world system and for unshackling Africa from the chains that locked it into the global system.

As Africa sought and seeks an international system in which it gets its due, it does not consider multilateralism anchored on the UN to be optional. It is existential.

Multilateralism is existential particularly where historical, political, socio-economic and geo-strategic conditions get in the way of Pan-African collective action.

Africa has often been failed by multilateral institutions. History is equally clear: Africa (as shackled as it has been and let down by its leaders) without multilateralism is Africa without leverage.

This is why attempts to bypass African multilateral institutions—whether in peace processes, economic negotiations, or security arrangements—are not neutral acts. They replace collective leverage with bilateral dependency.

THE NEW SCRAMBLE

Today’s scramble does not arrive with gunboats. It arrives through contracts, currency, legal instruments, digital infrastructure agreements, and critical minerals partnerships. Sometimes there are spectacular displays of force meant to send a message. More often, the mechanisms are quiet.

The danger is not engagement. Africa must engage the world. The danger lies in how Africa is engaging—fragmented, reactive, and uncoordinated—precisely at the moment when external actors are acting strategically when they engage Africa.

Fragmentation has become Africa’s primary strategic vulnerability.

Here is the paradox of our time. Africa has never mattered more. By 2030, nearly 1.7 billion people will live on the continent, including 40 percent of the world’s youth. Africa holds minerals essential to the green and digital transitions. Its geography anchors vital maritime routes.

In objective terms, Africa has leverage.

But leverage unused is leverage lost. And the reason is simple: disunity.

Fifty-five states negotiating separately. Trade deals concluded country by country. Mineral agreements signed in isolation. Data governance frameworks outsourced without shared standards.

External actors arrive with scale and long-term strategy. Africa responds with improvisation and short-term calculation. Even when individual deals appear attractive, their cumulative effect is erosion.

Fragmentation enables powerful actors to play states against one another—to extract concessions incrementally and shape rules Africa did not help write.

The pattern is not new. When preferential trade regimes were replaced by reciprocal arrangements, African economies suffered deeply. Industries collapsed and jobs disappeared. Yet the response was not collective; it was bilateral petitioning.

The same pattern now appears in critical minerals. Some states restrict exports. Others prioritize rapid extraction. Others advocate local processing. Each approach is rational on its own. Together, they form no strategy.

Without shared principles on value addition and safeguards, Africa remains a price-taker in industries it should help shape.

This fragmentation extends beyond economics—to migration policy, energy transition, and digital sovereignty. Africa is not setting the agenda. It is reacting to agendas set elsewhere.

Once again, sovereignty risks becoming a commodity—sliced, ranked, and traded. Not only by traditional great powers, but by rising middle powers as well.

Africa’s future is debated in rooms where Africans are either absent—or present without influence.

The emergence of private or semi-private diplomatic mechanisms raises further questions about the future of collective security. If mediation becomes transactional—if peace becomes an investment opportunity—what becomes of the principles embedded in the charters of continental and global institutions?

Will African institutions defend their mandates? Or will they defer to ad hoc structures shaped by private interest driven external power?

This dilemma is particularly acute because Africa’s own peace and security architecture has weakened. Norms exist. Institutions exist. But political will, commitment to Pan-Africanism and the drive for engaging in the difficult task of crafting imaginative collective solutions have withered.

Institutional limitation cannot become an alibi for capitulation. Moments of global upheaval demand coordination, moral courage, political imagination and leadership.

Africa does not require uniformity. It requires agreed minimums—baseline negotiating principles, solidarity mechanisms to prevent isolation, and the discipline to refuse piecemeal bargaining.

Africa must no longer negotiate its future piece by piece.

LEADERSHIP, SILENCE, AND RESPONSIBILITY

The most dangerous element of this moment is not external pressure. It is Africa’s silence.

That silence reflects a deeper leadership deficit. Too many leaders are products of fragile systems—elevated through survival skills, external sponsorship, or transactional compromise rather than vision and legitimacy.

At a moment demanding courage, Africa is governed by managerial survivalism. Bureaucratic Pan-Africanism administers decline instead of confronting history.

This vacuum invites manipulation. It emboldens insult. It fragments Africa state by state.

Africa has known another tradition—leaders who understood Africa not as geography, but as a political project.

That caliber of leadership is rare today. Yet Africa’s promise remains intact.

Africans must not accept defensive politics. A renewed Pan-Africanism—rooted in dignity, justice, and agency—is not optional. It is necessary.

Africa must engage the world as it is—but never at the cost of dignity.

IN CLOSING

The question is no longer whether Africa matters. It does.

The question is whether Africa will matter on its own terms and for its own interest.

History does not reward potential. It rewards organization and resolve.

The emerging global order is visible. The rank being assigned to Africa is visible. If that rank is accepted today, it may define the continent’s position for generations.

This is not a call for confrontation. It is a call for coordination.

If Africa acts together, this rupture can mark the beginning of strategic autonomy. If it does not, the new scramble will end quietly—without conquest, but with consequences just as enduring and damaging.

The responsibility rests in thought, political and organizational leadership.

History is watching.