Solomon Ayele Dersso, PhD, Founding Director, Amani Africa

When it kicks off today in Luanda, Angola, the major question that the extraordinary summit of the African Union (AU) on strengthening conflict prevention and resolution faces is whether it will mark a break from the past or be yet another missed opportunity.

Given the scale, nature and proliferation of conflicts across different parts of the continent, this is not a moment for a business-as-usual summitry. And, the challenge for this summit is not about adopting new decisions or a wish list of new activities to be undertaken over the course of the next few years or making marginal institutional refinements. Indeed, in adopting Assembly/AU/Dec.949(XXXIX) for holding an extraordinary summit in Luanda on the strengthening of mechanisms for conflict prevention and resolution in Africa, the 39^th ordinary session of the AU Assembly in February 2026 committed ‘to concrete, measurable, and time-bound deliverables, rather than a declarative forum.’

The question for this summit is accordingly whether African leaders gathering in Luanda will adopt decisive actions for exercising full responsibility and use all the diplomatic and normative arsenal at the disposal of the AU to arrest the downward spiral in the various conflict situations on the continent. Over the past decade, as a review of the first ten-year implementation of AU’s flagship peace and security agenda of Silencing the Guns revealed, the peace and security conditions and the operation of the African Peace and Security Architecture have come to run into major crises.

The result has been the emergence and entrenchment of a new era of conflicts and insecurity. The continent is witnessing the persistence and expansion of complex armed conflicts, the proliferation of violent extremist groups, recurring unconstitutional changes of government, intensified geopolitical competition, and growing humanitarian and climate-related pressures. As pointed out in Amani Africa’s signature publication accompanying the 39^th AU summit, ‘the nature and scale of conflicts in some of the affected regions is such that they pose an existential threat to the affected peoples and states.’ Indeed, the state of conflicts and insecurity is such that it necessitates the mobilisation of the kind of emergency collective action that AU member states mustered in responding to the COVID19 pandemic.

In this context, the decisiveness that member states need to summon in Luanda should lead to tasking the AU Commission Chairperson to institute an emergency situation room dedicated to the major conflict situations in Sudan, the Sahel, DRC and South Sudan under the direct responsibility of the Chairperson, supported by the Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security. In the same way, the AU mobilized collective action in response to COVID 19, such an emergency situation room will operate as an instrument for mobilising sustained and robust conflict resolution and peace restoring efforts, implementing politically and operationally sound conflict resolution strategy dedicated and tailored to each of the major conflict situations on the continent and building and nurturing the level of consensus and support from member states and regional and international actors required for effective collective action.

Such an approach will also help the AU to break from the inertia of the practice of the past years during which the AU increasingly lost influence. In several major crises across the continent, the AU has struggled to show leadership (by being the first to act and proactively, by articulating compelling political strategy, and by mobilising consensus among its member states around and support for such a strategy) in preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and mediation processes. APSA’s conflict prevention and resolution mechanisms did not fare well in respect of any of the major conflict situations. With the AU unable to seize the space for peace initiatives, various external actors have come to assume more prominent political and diplomatic roles. As documented in a report Re-energising Conflict Prevention and Resolution in Africa: a Quest to Salvage the APSA?, the APSA has struggled to respond to mounting challenges, with the leadership on Libya, Sudan and the DRC–Rwanda file passing to actors outside the continent while the AU plays, at best, a marginal role of legitimising such processes.

The lessons from the genesis and the first decade of the APSA also remain instructive for ending AU’s years of declining influence. The APSA and its implementation between early 2000 and early 2010s presented Africa with the platform that catalysed the journey towards the realisation of the long quest for pax Africana. A combination of factors including the provision of leadership by a group of leaders shaped by and seeking to overcome the horrors of war, not least of all the genocide against the Tutsi’s in Rwanda, renewed interest in and mobilization for Pan-Africanism and collective responsibility and a supportive international multilateral environment were critical both for the development of the APSA and its nearly a decade of relatively more successful efforts that contributed to reduction of conflicts in Africa.

Today, the changing international situation not only aggravates but also accelerates the conflict dynamics on the continent. Developments of the past few years show that the multilateral system is in deep crisis. Geopolitical tensions are deepening. Force is becoming a leading instrument in pursuing national interest. Breaches of fundamental rules of international law, including the UN Charter, have become recurrent. As documented in a policy brief on the 75^th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, what is troublesome is the fact not only that there is widespread violation of multilateral norms including IHL and the Geneva Conventions but also that ‘these violations are occurring without any fear of accountability, thus with impunity, and are often cloaked in attempts to justify or legitimise them.’

In such times of global disorder, responsibility primarily lies with and should be assumed by the continental body and its member states. The exercise of such responsibility, with resolute commitment, will be measured not just by the convening of meetings but by whether the force of decisions and the speed of follow-through would match the gravity and urgency of the emergency-level state of the peace and security situation on the continent. Unless African leaders gathered in Luanda rise to the moment, reassert the political purpose of the APSA, and reaffirm conflict prevention and resolution as an exercise in consequence by shaping the trajectory of conflicts through effective and sustained emergency peace restoring measures rather than episodic meetings and ceremonial processes, the AU may continue to float adrift as a new era of conflicts entrench and it concedes more space for external actors.

The last thing the continent needs from the Luanda summit is decisions that lead to ceremonial meetings and the establishment of processes bereft of political weight and consequences. As a special research report published ahead of the Luanda summit rightly pointed out, ‘[t]he continent should avoid becoming absorbed in prolonged consultations, expert processes and successive meetings while conflicts continue to inflict immense suffering on the ground. Africa cannot afford such a disconnect.’