For more than two decades, the African Union (AU) has been tasked with an ambitious mandate to prevent conflict, protect civilians, advance integration, and represent Africa in a changing world.

Yet as conflict deaths rise, displacement deepens, and wars proliferate across the continent, an uncomfortable question has become unavoidable: Is the AU still fit for purpose?A recent report by the Pan-African Agenda Institute suggests the answer is no, not because Africa lacks norms, frameworks, or declarations, but because the AU was built for a world that no longer exists.

The AU’s peace and security architecture emerged at the end of the Cold War, when multilateralism appeared stable, sovereignty was being cautiously reimagined, and external powers were willing to underwrite global order. That moment has passed.

The world is now in a dangerous interregnum, marked by multipolar rivalry, weakened international law, and a global race toward narrow national interest. Africa is not insulated from this shift; it is one of its primary theatres.

The numbers are stark. Conflict-related fatalities on the continent have increased dramatically over the past decade. Wars in Ethiopia, Sudan, the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Sahel have produced levels of death and displacement unseen since the 1990s.

This failure is structural. The AU possesses strong normative instruments, from the Constitutive Act’s non-indifference clause to the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), but implementation depends overwhelmingly on the consent of the very states that often perpetrate or enable violence. Sovereignty remains the organisation’s organising principle, even as state authority fractures internally.

As a result, the AU has become proficient at convening, issuing communiqués, and appointing envoys, while remaining largely unable to intervene decisively when atrocities occur. Preventive diplomacy is deployed late, mediation lacks political backing, and intervention mechanisms stall under the weight of member-state politics.

The report highlights a deeper contradiction, that Africa’s peace architecture assumes strong, coherent states capable of self-restraint and regional solidarity.

In reality, many member states are themselves sites of political fragmentation, militarisation, and elite competition. The AU is asked to stabilise conflicts produced by the same political orders that dominate its decision-making organs.

This tension has only intensified in a multipolar world. External actors, from Gulf states to global powers, increasingly shape African conflicts through proxy arrangements, security partnerships, and ad hoc mediation initiatives. As these parallel processes expand, the AU is sidelined into a performative role: present, but rarely decisive.

What makes this moment particularly consequential is Africa’s demographic reality. This is the youngest continent in the world, with a generation that experiences politics not through diplomatic summits but through lived insecurity, displacement, and digital visibility.

Young Africans are acutely aware of the gap between continental rhetoric and political outcomes. For them, “African solutions to African problems” rings hollow when wars are normalised, and accountability is deferred indefinitely.

The problem is not that the AU has failed to imagine a better Africa. It is that it has imagined too much without recalibrating its capacity to deliver. The organisation has accumulated mandates faster than it has built enforcement, legitimacy, or resources. Normative ambition has outpaced political will.

Perhaps most importantly, the report calls for confronting an uncomfortable truth: that continental integration cannot advance meaningfully when domestic political orders are unstable, exclusionary, or violent. No amount of institutional engineering can compensate for the erosion of legitimacy at the state level.

The AU’s crisis, then, is not one of intent but of fit. It governs a continent whose conflicts are faster, more fragmented, and more internationally entangled than those it was designed to manage.

Until its structures reflect that reality and until member states accept that sovereignty carries responsibility, not immunity, the AU will continue to lag behind Africa’s most urgent needs.

The question is no longer whether Africa needs a continental organisation. It is whether the AU is willing to become the one that this moment demands.

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