What opportunities does the New Agenda for Peace offer Africa?
The New Agenda for Peace holds promise for Africa, but success depends on its fitness for purpose and role-players’ commitment.
The uptick in global conflict trends has become increasingly apparent. The 2023 Global Peace Index found that the average level of global peace deteriorated by 0.42%, an estimated reduction of 13 times in the last 15 years. In 2022, even though peace improved in 84 countries, it significantly deteriorated in 79 others.
Interconnected crises have become the basis for ongoing calls to resolve deepening present and future peace and security problems. Examples of such global interlocked crises are the Russia-Ukraine war, the violent extremist threat in the Sahel, instability in the Horn of Africa and, most recently, the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza.
United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres’s policy brief on a New Agenda for Peace (NAP) is a promising avenue for managing global risks and threats. It draws attention to essential shifts in the multilateral system and calls for redress in containing the compounding effects of multiple crises. Given Africa’s central contribution to global peace and security and the scale and magnitude of threats on the continent, will NAP address its numerous challenges? And will African policymakers rise to meet the NAP goals?
NAP in context
NAP comprises one of 11 policy papers developed to frame the discussion during the Summit for the Future expected to take place in September 2024. At the summit, member states are expected to negotiate a new global pact for more effective and collective multilateral efforts to better meet current and future challenges. Lauding the summit as a ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate global action, Guterres requested member states to recommit to fundamental universal principles and further develop the frameworks of multilateralism so they are fit for the future’.
Will African policymakers rise to meet the NAP goals?
NAP emphasises the increasing threat to peace and security emerging from risks and dangerous trends for which traditional forms of prevention, management and resolution are ill-suited. It highlights the need to strengthen international multilateral security cooperation to deliver peace as a global public good.
It then advances 12 proposals in five priority areas necessary to address insecurity globally, that are also pertinent to the African continent. These include global prevention focusing on strategic risks and geopolitical divisions, preventing conflict and violence and sustaining peace, and strengthening peace operations and ensuring peace enforcement. In addition, there is a need for novel approaches to peace and potential conflicts, and bolstering international governance.
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Implications for Africa
The NAP has clear implications for Africa, a continent that disproportionately shares the burden of global insecurity. First, it recognises the peculiarities of Africa’s insecurity and exclusively mentions Africa and the African Union (AU).
This is pertinent as African conflicts continue to dominate the UN Security Council (UNSC) agenda and the UN dedicates most of its peacekeeping human and financial resources to managing crises on the continent.
Secondly, African officials have acknowledged the ongoing need to alter the management of insecurity. Africa’s dire security calls for a real new approach that should question the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) and its correlation with new destabilising factors. This is consistent with NAP's aspiration for a strategy shift by creating the ‘new deal’, symbolising the required fundamental changes to achieve more successful multilateral action for peace.
Thirdly, though NAP is a document with a global geographic focus, it also puts forward recommendations for enhancing the peace and security efforts of the AU and its subregional counterparts. NAP recognises the unique roles of partners to lead a new generation of peace enforcement missions and counter-terrorism operations.
Reshaping paradigms and approaches
At its core, NAP is an assessment of global security followed by a set of proposals for remedial action. It underscores that the UN-centred collective security mechanism fails to deliver peace as a global public good. NAP attributes the cracks in collective security to neglect of three major principles: trust, solidarity and universality.
The cracks in collective security are a result of a lack of trust, solidarity and universality
NAP is an important opportunity to revitalise APSA. In July 2023, the Peace and Security Council (PSC) requested the AU Commission to review APSA. The intention was, among others, to adapt to Africa’s contemporary security challenges and develop an AU strategy to promote community responses to conflicts on the continent. The latter is aligned with NAP’s recommendation that member states and regional organisations develop cross-regional prevention strategies.
NAP further proposes boosting preventive diplomacy in an era of divisions and recommends that global diplomacy must both reinforce and be bolstered by regional frameworks that build cooperation among member states. These recommendations help generate momentum around an intra-African process that recommits African states to a continental conflict prevention agenda.
This requires bold political measures and institutional transformation. Beyond reaffirming commitment to conflict prevention, genuine political will is needed to use AU early warning and response structures such as the Panel of the Wise.
NAP also recognises the pivotal role regional organisations play in peace enforcement. Its call to consider UN support requests for AU and subregional deployments offers the opportunity to resource peace efforts adequately. Such proposals are made considering the unique roles of African partners under the new generation of peace enforcement and counter-terrorism operations to address the proliferation of non-state armed groups and other interlocking threats.
Takeaways for the PSC
NAP and the summit may not be strictly binding processes with an enforcement mechanism. The former is also criticised for not being sufficiently innovative and for failing to devise clear and concrete measures and enforcement mechanisms to achieve objectives.
The AU must galvanise African thoughts and reflections to feed into the summit
Yet, both offer a vital opportunity to ignite debates on global and regional collective security mechanisms. The AU must spearhead a regional process that galvanises African thoughts and reflections to feed into the summit. In the lead-up to the event/summit, the PSC could convene a dedicated session on Africa’s position in the negotiation, having called beforehand for expert papers and non-papers to generate discussions.
In addition, before engaging with UN member states at the summit, the PSC should follow-up on the implementation of its decision for stocktaking, assessment and review of APSA, which are vital for calibrating requirements to address African insecurity.
The APSA review should include assessing the efficacy of operational approaches and working methods on conflict prevention – most notably on early warning – and its mediation capabilities. It's equally important to consolidate institutional competencies and improve collaboration within and between the various organisations in conflict prevention. The new deal NAP seeks should be leveraged for better domestication and buy-in by member states at all levels.
APSA discussions should also clarify mechanisms for deploying peace support operations and interventions under articles 4(h) and 4(j) of the AU Constitutive Act. An important starting point is revisiting the decision-making process for mandating the African Standby Force (ASF) by establishing why member states are not authorising the framework for addressing insecurity. Considering the growing use of ad hoc security mechanisms, the AU must also explore and rationalise these mechanisms’ roles within the ASF framework.
