Attachments
As the African Union prepares to choose new leadership, it faces several forbidding challenges in the peace and security domain. This briefing points to eight areas where the organisation can put its diplomatic weight to particularly good use.
What’s new? African heads of state gather for their annual summit on 15-16 February, with several hot wars raging on the continent while traditional peacemaking mechanisms falter.
Why does it matter? Absent diplomatic intervention, the deadly conflicts in Africa are apt to get worse and to further spill over national borders. With the West and other outside powers looking inward or otherwise distracted, if African leaders do not take up the mediator’s mantle it is quite possible that no one will.
What should be done? In 2025, the African Union should support mediation in Sudan; work to stop multi-sided confrontation in the Great Lakes; bolster Somali security and keep channels open in the central Sahel; help Cameroon organise credible elections and South Sudan weather Sudan’s war; and forge a common approach to climate change’s impact.
Overview
It is an unsettled time on the African continent. For the first time since the post-Cold War 1990s, most of its regions are convulsed by conflict. All this unrest is occurring at a time of global disorder. Even before the U.S. electorate reinstalled President Donald Trump in the White House, a combination of factors, including economic headwinds stirred by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic as well as decaying multilateral institutions, were inhibiting collective action to contain security threats. Now the system is in even bigger trouble, as the new administration hints at deep cuts in assistance to organisations once central to peacemaking and toys with upending norms barring interstate land grabs. Sweeping U.S. foreign aid cuts announced in late January will immiserate millions, many in Africa. As AU heads of state gather for their annual summit on 15-16 February in this forbidding climate, they need to grapple with this reality: if the AU’s leaders and member states do not take greater responsibility for conflict prevention on the continent, it is quite possible that no one will.
Africa’s peace and security challenges are a function of overlapping crises. On one side are the conflicts themselves. Start with the Horn of Africa, where civil war in Sudan threatens to fragment the state, spilling over into an extremely weak South Sudan and maybe into Chad as well. Somalia is in only a marginally better place, with yet another deadline having passed for phasing out the AU security mission that, in various iterations, has been helping Mogadishu battle Al-Shabaab insurgents since 2007. Ethiopia, traditionally the region’s anchor state, may be calmer than it was at the height of the Tigray conflict that wracked the country’s north from 2020 to 2022, but it is still fighting several insurgencies – including in the populous Oromia and Amhara regions.
Looking west, in the central Sahel, transitional authorities have kicked out French and U.S. troops that helped provide security and intelligence support in the area and pulled out of the Economic Community of West African States. They are now looking to the Russian security firm called Africa Corps (formerly part of Wagner Group) for support in battling the jihadists who rampage across the region. These militants are still gaining ground, but the central Sahelian authorities portray the new arrangements as respecting their sovereignty in a way that France – the former colonial power – ostensibly did not.
Toward the centre of the continent, Cameroon’s oft-overlooked Anglophone conflict enters its eighth year without a political resolution in sight, while fighting between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) becomes more dangerous with each passing day: the former backs the March 23 (M23) rebels who captured Goma, the biggest city in the DRC’s North Kivu province, on 27 January. The rebels are seeking as well to take neighbouring South Kivu’s capital, Bukavu, although a unilateral ceasefire they announced on 4 February has paused their offensive for now. The risk this war could morph into a multi-country confrontation in the Great Lakes recalling the horrors of the 1990s is high.
Finally, in southern Africa: post-election turmoil erupted in Mozambique in October after the opposition claimed the vote had been rigged. A harsh police reaction saw hundreds of protesters killed and the instability brought economic activity to a halt for months. The insurgency in the country’s northern Cabo Delgado province continues, albeit at a fairly low intensity.
If the crisis of conflict in Africa is reaching geographic proportions that it has not seen in decades, it is compounded by a further crisis of peacemaking.
But if the crisis of conflict in Africa is reaching geographic proportions that it has not seen in decades, it is compounded by a further crisis of peacemaking, both around the world and in Africa in particular. As Crisis Group has written elsewhere, the involvement of a multitude of external powers backing rival sides in conflicts, notably in Sudan, heightens the challenges mediators face. Adventurism seems to have scant consequences. No major figure has been brought to account for the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray, for example, though it was one of the bloodiest Africa has seen in years. Also, dysfunction at multilateral institutions, notably the UN Security Council, which is hostage to major-power rivalry, means that the UN is largely a bystander amid all the tumult.
With conflicts proliferating and traditional peacemaking mechanisms faltering, there is both need and opportunity for the AU to up its game. The organisation’s weaknesses are well known – inadequate funding, squabbles within the AU Commission and jostling for leadership between the AU and its regional blocs hobble its capacity to intervene. Yet it also has certain deeply rooted strengths. Perhaps most important among them is that its legitimacy is not contested. Indeed, many Africans cherish its history as a vehicle for expressing pan-African ideals. It also has diplomatic heft. In recent years, the AU has managed to rally states behind shared goals such as a landmark intra-African trade agreement (though follow-through has been patchy). It pulled off a widely praised collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, it scored a major diplomatic win when it became a member of the G20 in 2023, putting it in a position to work with the 2025 chair, South Africa (a G20 member in its own right), to advance continental objectives in this group of the world’s most influential economies.
A positive, if concededly optimistic, vision for the AU as peacemaker would see it drawing on these strengths to settle into a role that it is uniquely equipped to play on a continent whose people are increasingly sceptical of outsiders. Indeed, for a period in the early 2000s following a wave of reforms driven by progressive leaders from key member states such as South Africa, Nigeria and Ethiopia, the AU seemed to be living up to its mandate, engaging in assertive peacemaking and encouraging better governance among member states. That momentum has been lost in recent years, and the AU needs to go back to basics. In particular, it needs to adhere to the words of its own constitutive act, which puts promoting peaceful coexistence among member states at the core of the AU’s mission.
In practice, the AU should lend its diplomatic weight to peacemaking efforts – whether in forging common regional positions on a trouble spot, shuttling between the parties to create openings or taking the lead on mediation. It should draw lessons from its ponderous, inexcusably muddled response to the outbreak of war in Sudan and seek to be more fleetfooted when conflict breaks out, staking out options for de-escalation and maintaining engagement in pursuing resolution. It has, above all, a responsibility to show Africa’s deep concern about its crises and carry this message to all global forums where security is being discussed.
Of course, its capacity for effective diplomacy will be a function of its leadership. The summit on 15-16 February will be closely watched in part because it will usher in the organisation’s new leaders. Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat is stepping down after two four-year terms at the helm; three men from East Africa are vying to succeed him. Within the AU, there are at least some hopes that the new chair will bring new energy and assertiveness to the role, injecting vigour into the organisation’s work at a crucial time. Faced with escalating wars and protracted conflicts, it may not be fair to expect the AU leadership to work miracles, but making sure that the organisation uses its every advantage is of increasing importance, especially at a time when there is every reason to expect growing U.S. disinterest and European distraction.
Eight priorities for the AU in the coming year are as follows:
1. Renewing AU leadership on peace and security
2. Supporting Sudan mediation efforts
3. Averting a regional war in the Great Lakes
4. Launching another AU force in Somalia
5. Searching for ways to engage the central Sahel
6. Helping Cameroon organise credible elections
7. Preventing South Sudan from capsizing
8. Adopting a position on climate security
This list is by no means exhaustive. Other conflicts continue to plague the continent. In Ethiopia, as noted, the army is engaged in battles with insurgents in its Amhara and Oromo, and relations with Eritrea are poisoned. The Central African Republic remains beset by intercommunal violence, clashes over resources and instability at the helm. Libya remains divided with no real prospects for elections. Mozambique, as outlined, is contending with a political and security crisis. New hotspots could also emerge over the coming months, putting the AU and its new leadership to the test. In sum, Africa’s leaders have no choice but to take greater responsibility for resolving the many conflicts raging on the continent. In a fractured and charged geopolitical environment, AU member states should impress upon the institution’s new leadership that a complacent, hands-off approach is a luxury the AU cannot afford.