Africa, moral agency and strategic futures
A pivotal inflection point in global peace and security demands new strategic positioning as Africa navigates a fragmenting world order.
The contemporary international order is undergoing a period of profound systemic transition. The post–Cold War vision of a rules-based global order, long framed as the legal and moral foundation of international peace, now shows clear signs of crisis and historical unravelling. Across multiple regions, protracted wars reveal widening fractures in global governance and a deepening crisis of normative legitimacy, while renewed militarisation, unaccountable breaches of international law, and resurgent economic nationalism entrench instability.
For African states, these disruptions generate immediate economic and security vulnerabilities while simultaneously opening strategic space for greater diplomatic autonomy, deeper regional integration, and more self-determined leadership in shaping an evolving international order grounded in justice and shared human dignity. As inherited assumptions about liberal order and multilateral stewardship erode, this moment represents an opportunity: a historic opening for Africa to move beyond reactive diplomacy toward articulating alternative visions of political community, ethical responsibility and global cooperation grounded in justice, solidarity and moral imagination.
At this historical juncture, the decline of liberal peacemaking reveals both crisis and possibility: it creates a strategic moment for Africa to help shape a more just, peaceful and humane international order through ethically grounded policy leadership.
Africa can help shape a more just, peaceful and humane international order through ethically grounded policy leadership
This broader inflection point is evident in the shift from liberal peacemaking toward more transactional forms of conflict management. Across multiple contemporary conflicts, liberal peace initiatives have stalled, eroded or collapsed. What once appeared to be temporary setbacks now reveals a deeper systemic transformation in the global governance of war and peace. Assumptions that once underpinned liberal peacemaking, grounded in international law, multilateral legitimacy and commitments to justice and reconciliation, are steadily eroding, giving way to pragmatic arrangements shaped by geopolitical rivalry, security patronage and elite economic interests. Instead of pursuing sustainable political transformation, emerging approaches prioritise the containment and management of violence through ceasefire agreements, power-sharing formulas and resource-driven incentives that stabilise conflict without resolving its structural causes. This shift reflects not episodic policy failure but a profound reconfiguration in the governing logic of international peace and security.
Scholars describe this transformation as the emergence of revisionist conflict management. Interpreting the war in Ukraine as emblematic of this shift, Nik Hynek, Oliver Richmond and Michal Šenk argue that contemporary peace processes are moving away from negotiated, rights-based settlements toward coercive and transactional modalities designed to stabilise territorial gains, protect elite economic interests and sideline democratic participation and civil society. Within this paradigm, peace becomes oriented less toward structural transformation than toward coercive stability and negotiated hierarchy, producing fragile or negative peace rather than positive and sustainable peace.
Consequently, ceasefires increasingly function as mechanisms of territorial freezing, mediation is reduced to transactional brokerage, and the language of peace itself is mobilised to legitimise asymmetries of power rather than transform their underlying causes. For African policymakers, these developments carry significant implications. Jakkie Cilliers of the Institute for Security Studies contends that intensifying geopolitical fragmentation and cultural contestation within Western powers signal the erosion of assumptions about a stable liberal order, underscoring the need for African adaptability and strategic recalibration in an increasingly volatile global environment.
Understanding this transition is essential for assessing how changes in global peacemaking reshape questions of justice, legitimacy and Africa’s strategic positioning within a fragmenting international order.
The systemic disruption reshaping the governance of war and peace is not confined to diplomacy or geopolitics; it is equally manifest within the intellectual field historically charged with analysing and informing peace processes. The erosion of liberal peacemaking exposes how Conflict Studies itself emerged within, and was sustained by, the institutional and normative architecture of the post–Cold War liberal order. As multilateral consensus fragments and geopolitical rivalry intensifies, core assumptions regarding negotiated settlement, humanitarian protection and externally supported democratic transition lose empirical grounding, rendering the field’s apparent disciplinary crisis inseparable from a broader transformation in global order.
Wolfram Lacher and Yvan Guichaoua contend that conflict studies developed during an era defined by Western-led peace operations that no longer structure contemporary warfare or diplomacy. With the retreat of liberal interventionism, declining multilateral mediation and intensifying geopolitical competition, the field’s humanitarian premises, policy influence and access to conflict environments have eroded, marginalising peacebuilding expertise while moral consensus around preventing mass violence fractures. Recent scholarship similarly demonstrates that the institutional infrastructures through which peacebuilding knowledge once exercised authority, such as multilateral mediation frameworks, are no longer central to contemporary conflict resolution. The consequence is a deeper destabilisation of the conceptual foundations upon which the field was constructed.
The apparent “demise” of Conflict Studies signals not the disappearance of scholarly engagement with war and peace, but the historical exhaustion of a liberal paradigm that conflated peacebuilding expertise with conditions of Western geopolitical predominance. The waning of that order exposes the limits of technocratic peace intervention and underscores the urgency of renewed theoretical, ethical and decolonial frameworks capable of engaging a world increasingly structured by transactional power, contested sovereignty and plural normative horizons. Nowhere are the stakes of this transition more visible, or its possibilities more consequential, than in Africa’s evolving position within a fragmenting international order.
For African states and regional institutions, this paradigmatic shift carries consequences that are simultaneously constraining and generative. The erosion of multilateral legitimacy and the rise of transactional conflict management risk deepening external dependency and stabilisation without justice, patterns that have historically marginalised African agency. Yet, the weakening of liberal orthodoxies also opens space for African actors to articulate alternative peacebuilding approaches grounded in regional solidarity, socio-economic transformation and historically informed justice.
Africa’s experiences of colonial conquest, apartheid, proxy warfare and externally imposed economic restructuring expose the persistent disjuncture between universal principles and political realities. At the same time, they provide an ethical vantage point for contributing to debates on global governance reform, equitable security architectures and renewed South–South cooperation.
If contemporary peace processes increasingly resemble what Hynek, Richmond and Šenk describe as “peace-washing”, stabilising violence while obscuring injustice through elite geopolitical bargains, African diplomacy faces a defining moral choice: reproduce unjust stability or advance peace grounded in justice, accountability and social inclusion. Normative credibility thus becomes a strategic resource in shaping the emerging international order.
African diplomacy faces a defining moral choice: reproduce unjust stability or advance peace grounded in justice, accountability and social inclusion
The transformation of global peacemaking carries urgent implications for African peace and security policy. Emerging patterns of revisionist conflict management, marked by the containment of violence without structural resolution, the marginalisation of civil society, the privileging of geopolitical and economic interests and the normalisation of imposed or frozen settlements, risk entrenching fragile or negative peace across the continent. Continental and regional institutions therefore face a strategic imperative: to preserve the normative integrity of mediation, integrate social inclusion and accountability into security frameworks, and ensure that reconstruction advances equitable and participatory political orders rather than stabilising inequality.
This moment calls for principled non-alignment grounded not in passive neutrality but in ethical clarity and strategic autonomy. Practically, such an orientation entails the consistent defence of international law, the strengthening of autonomous African mediation and peace operations capacity, proactive leadership in multilateral reform debates, including United Nations governance, debt justice, climate finance and peacebuilding resources, and sustained norm entrepreneurship centred on civilian protection, inclusive governance and socio-economic justice.
In a world where both liberal interventionism and authoritarian revisionism reveal profound limitations, Africa’s convergence of moral vision and strategic autonomy may offer a distinct third horizon for global peacebuilding. Africa’s demographic weight, diplomatic reach and accumulated peacebuilding experience position the continent to exercise meaningful influence in this moment of systemic transition, so long as strategic capacity remains grounded in ethical purpose. Its intertwined histories of struggle, reconciliation and unfinished justice, together with enduring traditions of communal responsibility and ubuntu spiritual humanism, offer resources of profound significance for reimagining global peace. Engaging these inheritances does not romanticise the past; rather, it affirms the possibility of renewing international order.
Africa’s demographic weight, diplomatic reach and accumulated peacebuilding experience position the continent to exercise meaningful influence in this moment of systemic transition, so long as strategic capacity remains grounded in ethical purpose
At this pivotal inflection point, the defining question for African leadership is how to help shape this emerging international landscape. The task is to translate moral vision into coordinated policy, strengthening regional institutions, advancing equitable security frameworks and shaping global governance reforms that embed justice, sustainable peace and human dignity in the emerging international order.
In this way, Africa’s response to the present transition may come to mark a turning point in its own history and a generative contribution to a more just and humane world order.
Image: insspirito/Pixabay
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