INTEL READS: The African Union’s Confounding Absenteeism (via World Politics Review)
Abd-el-Kader Cheref, February 5, 2026
INTEL READS | Ujasusi Blog Originals
The African continent is currently wracked by crises, ranging from multi-layered conflicts and civil wars to democratic erosion and stalled decolonization efforts. These crises are all driven by local factors, but they also all share a common feature: the African Union’s silence and powerlessness in the face of Africa’s major geopolitical challenges and humanitarian catastrophes.
The African Union was established in 2002, marking a break with its predecessor, the Organization of African Unity, which was often criticized for its inaction, particularly its failure to deal with the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The AU was supposed to represent a new, responsible, united and proactive Africa. Yet 23 years later, this dream seems to be fading. Today, the continent is no longer seen as a key player, but rather as an arena for intervention by outside powers, including China, the U.S., the European Union, Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
The AU’s weakness and lack of decisive action is not a recent development: Its failure to meaningfully intervene in myriad wars on the continent dates back to the Darfur conflict in the mid-2000s that is widely recognized as a genocide. This inaction is in part due to the AU’s internal divisions, but its chronic financial dependence on external partners—particularly among the veto-wielding powers on the U.N. Security Council—also plays a role, as the AU is often unwilling to act without the implicit approval of these external actors, who then impose conditionalities that not only interfere with national sovereignty but also with development priorities.
To its credit, the AU has taken steps to bolster its authority through its “Vision 2063” blueprint, which involves measures for self-funding, creating binding implementation mechanisms that ensure member states follow through on their commitments under the agenda, empowering the continent’s regional economic communities to deal with conflict prevention and management, and improving the management of the AU Commission.
Despite those good intentions, however, the AU has been unable to fully enforce its decisions or play a meaningful role in the many political, economic and humanitarian crises that Africa has been dealing with in recent years. These include abuses and predation in the mineral-rich eastern provinces of Congo; the ruthless and bloody civil war in Sudan; the stalled decolonization of Western Sahara; the erosion of democracy in the Sahel region; and tensions between Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia in the Horn of Africa.
In addition to the human cost caused by these conflicts, they have also become breeding grounds for terrorist groups, paramilitary militias and foreign mercenaries, which are now operating flagrantly in Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic and Mozambique, among others. Amid all this suffering and corrosive instability, it is reasonable to wonder why the AU remains disengaged.
Take eastern Congo, where the ongoing offensive by Rwanda-backed M23 rebels is just the most visible aspect of the region’s multi-layered conflicts. According to Doctors Without Borders, thousands of civilians are massacred every year by belligerents across eastern Congo. This would seem to be an obvious case for action by the AU’s Peace and Security Council, or PSC, which as the AU’s “armed wing” of continental diplomacy has the authority to implement the body’s common defense policy and impose sanctions for unconstitutional changes of government. Yet throughout 2025, the PSC has only issued calls to action, statements and rhetorical warnings regarding the escalating conflict in eastern Congo, while endorsing the East African Community’s diplomatic initiatives. The failure to take more decisive action has allowed the abuses to fester.
In Sudan, a civil war that broke out in April 2023 pitting the Sudanese Armed Forces of Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against the Rapid Support Forces of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo has become one of the continent’s most serious humanitarian crises. According to the latest estimates from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 10.7 million people have been displaced, including 1.8 million who have sought refuge in neighboring countries. The World Food Program describes the situation in Sudan as catastrophic, but the AU remains strangely uninvolved.
The AU’s prolonged inaction in the face of crises is not merely a diplomatic failure; it has tragic consequences on the ground.
The PSC has limited itself to a few perfunctory statements calling for restraint and dialogue in Sudan, but it has not sent an observer mission, deployed a peacekeeping force or mandated a strong mediation effort. The AU Commission’s then-chairperson, Moussa Faki Mahamat, did condemn the violence last year, but he stopped short of laying down a clear political roadmap to halt the hostilities. As a result, it is U.S. diplomacy and Saudi mediation through the 2023 Jeddah process that are handling the negotiations between the warring factions in Sudan, leaving the AU marginalized.
Another major geopolitical issue is the ongoing dispute over self-determination for Western Sahara. This phosphate-rich but sparsely populated desert territory in northwest Africa was a Spanish colony until 1975. But when Spain withdrew from the territory, Morocco moved in to claim it, despite a political and armed movement seeking independent statehood. As a result, Western Sahara is still the subject of a longstanding U.N.-mediated decolonization dispute between Rabat, which administers the majority of the territory under limited autonomy status, and the Algeria-backed Polisario Front, representing the region’s Indigenous Sahrawi people.
In October 2025, the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution that supports Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara, shifting negotiations from a focus on holding an independence referendum called for by the U.N.-brokered peace agreement in 1991, toward a framework of “autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty.” Here, too, the AU has been sidelined on a diplomatic file with major political and security implications.
In the Sahel, successive coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Niger have given rise to a patchwork of military-run governments in a region beset by Islamist insurgencies. According to the Global Terrorism Index 2025, more than 45 percent of the victims of terrorism globally are now in sub-Saharan Africa, compared to 26 percent in 2015. Groups such as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin are exploiting poverty, ethnic tensions, government corruption and lack of governance to expand the territory under their control.
The AU should have intervened through preventive mediation and coordinated military responses, including by African forces operating under a joint command. Instead, it ceded the initiative to France, which launched the ill-fated G5 Sahel in parallel with its own military intervention in the Sahel. With the breakdown of the G5 Sahel and the ejection of French forces by Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, local militias have flourished and thrived.
The AU’s prolonged inaction in the face of crises is not merely a diplomatic failure; it has tragic consequences on the ground. And the vacuum left by legitimate institutions quickly becomes fertile ground not only for the rise of terrorist groups and paramilitary militias, but also for foreign mercenaries.
In several regions, foreign private military companies, or PMCs, now operate without any real governmental oversight. Russia’s Africa Corps—formerly Wagner Group—are present in Libya, the Central African Republic, Mali, Mozambique and Sudan. Turkish PMCs are also active in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, where Emirati PMCs employing hundreds of former Colombian soldiers as well as Western PMCs are also operating under the guise of training missions.
Often motivated by economic interests such as energy and mineral resources as well as strategic transport routes, these actors are exacerbating Africa’s security dependence, while also transforming fragile states into competing spheres of influence where African sovereignty is eroded. By remaining a mere spectator, the AU is losing not only its political influence on the continent but also its moral authority, which was meant to guarantee that Africa would no longer be “the battleground of others.”
The time has come for a continental awakening, a pan-African renaissance that combines political acumen with moral responsibility. With greater political will, the AU can considerably expand its crisis-resolution role, first and foremost by establishing greater autonomy through enhanced financial independence, which can be accomplished by increasing member state contributions. Fostering intra-African trade will also help to promote the kind of stability that prevents crises from arising in the first place.
To play a greater role, the AU must also invest heavily in preventive diplomacy; restructure its diplomatic and peacekeeping responses under a unified strategy; and coordinate better with the continent’s multiple Regional Economic Communities as well as international partners such as the U.N. and the European Union.
Last but not least, AU-led peace missions must surmount bureaucratic hurdles in addressing humanitarian, developmental and security needs, and ensure that member states prioritize continental interests over narrow national ones. Taking these vital steps will allow the AU to reclaim its leadership in securing continental peace and stability against evolving threats. But doing so will require political will, without which the AU will be condemned to remain where it now finds itself: on the sidelines.
