The gathering storm facing Africa in 2026: Entrenching conflicts, Fractured Order, and eroding agency

Date | 14 January 2026

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

Solomon Ayele Dersso, PhD, Founding Director, Amani Africa

Africa is entering 2026 not at a moment of transition, but at a moment of reckoning. Across the continent, armed conflict, state fragmentation, humanitarian collapse, economic distress, climate shocks, democratic erosion, and geopolitical entanglement are converging with a simultaneity and intensity unseen in recent decades. What distinguishes this moment is not the presence of crisis per se, but the growing risk that instability is becoming structural rather than episodic—normalized rather than exceptional.

This reckoning is unfolding against the backdrop of a deepening global disorder. The international system itself is unraveling at alarming speed. Established norms, institutions, and rules are eroding, replaced by ad hoc power politics, coercive economic statecraft, and fierce geopolitical competition. This disorder is not stabilizing. It is accelerating—and its consequences are ominous, particularly for Africa and others in the global South as events on Christmas day in Nigeria and on 6 January in Venezuela illustrate.

Parts of the Global South are struggling, unevenly and imperfectly, to reposition themselves in response to this turbulence. The question for Africa is, as SRSG and Head of UN Office to the AU Parfait Onanga-Anyanga recently put it, will it position itself to negotiate collective interests amidst this prolific and plural competition, or will African countries get picked off one by one?

Africa, however, enters 2026 with no clear evidence of serious, collective, continent-wide strategic reflection on how to navigate the emerging global order. As captured in a recent Amani Africa policy brief, Africa’s engagement is characterized by fragmentation, operating on the basis of ‘a patchwork of’ individual, often competing foreign policies of African states. While individual states and sub-regions may be engaging externally, they are largely doing so through transactional, bilateral, and short-term calculations, rather than through a shared Pan-African vision or common strategic posture.

The result is deeply concerning. Fierce competition among middle powers and major powers in Africa is deliberately fragmenting the continent, integrating African states, sub-regions, and institutions—by default or by design—into rival spheres of influence, one by one. This process steadily undermines Africa’s capacity to articulate and defend common positions, erodes continental solidarity, and dismantles the very foundations of collective action. These conditions are compounded due to the absence of a collective policy for governing its relations with global actors.

As Nkrumah prophesied on the dire consequences of disunity, without collectivity, Africa will not be a shaper of the emerging global order. It will be relegated to a footnote—reacting, adapting, and absorbing the consequences of decisions made elsewhere. In such a scenario, Pan-Africanism itself becomes hollow, reduced to rhetoric rather than strategy, symbolism rather than power.

The Geography of Africa’s Polycrisis

From the Horn of Africa to the Sahel and the Great Lakes region, conflict has ceased to be contained within national borders or finite political disputes, as extensively documented in Amani Africa signature publications (here and here). Instead, it has become regionalized, protracted, and embedded within broader political and economic systems. These regions now function as interconnected theaters of instability—zones where internal fragmentation intersects with external intervention, and where war increasingly sustains itself.

Arms flows, armed groups, war economies, displaced populations, and political narratives move fluidly across borders. Violence migrates, mutates, and reproduces itself. Local wars acquire continental and global consequences, disrupting trade corridors, fueling forced migration, and drawing in ever more external actors.

From Contested Wars to Permanent War Systems

In its signature publication accompanying the African Union summit, a report by Amani Africa poignantly pointed out that Africa has entered a new era of insecurity and instability. The nature of war in Africa has fundamentally changed. Contemporary conflicts are no longer primarily about seizing state power or achieving decisive military victory. They increasingly resemble wars of permanence—open-ended struggles sustained by political fragmentation, economic incentives, and geopolitical rivalry.

Armed actors have proliferated and diversified. States confront militias, paramilitaries, mercenary formations, and hybrid security forces, often while relying on similar actors themselves. Authority is diffused, accountability diluted, and violence outsourced.

Conflict has become economically rational. Smuggling, trafficking, illicit taxation, aid diversion, and control of trade routes sustain armed groups and political elites alike. Entire war economies have taken root, making peace politically difficult and economically threatening for those who profit from disorder.

External entanglement has intensified. Middle powers and global rivals increasingly treat African conflict zones as arenas of strategic competition. Access to resources, ports, markets, and military facilities frequently outweigh commitments to peace.

Civilians are no longer incidental victims, as exemplified by events in Sudan which are documented in Amani Africa’s report on prioritizing the protection of civilians. Displacement, starvation, and terror are increasingly deployed as strategies of control. Norms have eroded. Ceasefires rarely hold. Agreements no longer bind. Mediation is widely mistrusted.

Elections Without Peace: Democracy as a Risk Multiplier

As Africa approaches 2026, a dense calendar of elections looms across fragile and polarized contexts. Elections conducted without political settlement, security guarantees, institutional trust, and political inclusion do not endure. They redistribute conflict rather than resolve it.

Consistent with the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, the African Union must urgently revisit its election observation, validation, and certification practices. Recent controversial elections and rulings have eroded public trust in electoral politics, particularly in the context of upcoming elections in 2026.

The Collapse of Multilateral Authority

At precisely the moment Africa needs collective action, its multilateral institutions are at their weakest. Political capture, failure to articulate clear vision and mobilize consensus of member states, inconsistency, underfunding, and external bypassing have eroded credibility and enforcement capacity.

Peace initiatives are increasingly brokered outside African multilateral frameworks. They tend to be driven by transactional mindsets that prioritize short-term deals over norms and durable political settlements. This trend poses a mortal danger to Africa’s peace and security architecture, as the loss of leadership of the African Union (AU)on many files clearly attests.

Toward a Reform Agenda: Reclaiming Politics, Collectivity, and Pan-African Agency

This trajectory is not inevitable. But reversing it requires decisive collective action.

Africa must urgently undertake a serious, collective strategic reflection on its position in the emerging global order. The AU institutional reform offers an opportunity but only if it is done in a manner that breaks from the failed business as usual approach of the past years. The AU, together with regional economic communities, must craft and articulate a common Pan-African strategy to resist fragmentation and reclaim agency.

The primacy of politics must guide multilateral action. Conflict prevention and resolution need to be revitalized, anchored on robust diplomacy for peace. Peacemaking, mediation, and peacebuilding—not transactional dealmaking—must remain the core mandate of Africa’s multilateral institutions. Ceasefires are necessary but insufficient; they are steps toward political settlement, not substitutes for it.

Conflicts that are regional in nature require integrated regional strategies. Enforcement must matter. Decisions without consequences erode credibility.

War economies must be dismantled. Conflict financing networks, trafficking routes, and external sponsorship must be disrupted through coordinated regional and international action.

Peace initiatives must be principled and based on courageous leadership and impartial but solidly supported diplomatic strategy.

Civilians must be re-centered. Peace processes that exclude social forces, youth, women, and displaced populations lack legitimacy and durability.

Finally, elections must be subordinated to peace, not the reverse. No more elections without security guarantees, political inclusion, and consensus on the rules of the game.

2026: A Line in the Sand

Africa is approaching a decisive threshold. If current trends persist, 2026 may be remembered as the moment when permanent war became structurally entrenched and Africa’s collective voice fatally weakened.

The future remains salvageable—but only if serious reform based on recommitment to and robust defense of AU norms replaces ritual, collective strategy replaces fragmentation, and peace and Pan-Africanism are reclaimed as deliberate political choices rather than rhetorical aspirations bereft of resolve.

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’