South Africa’s department of international relations and cooperation announced its ascension to the African Union Peace and Security Council for a two-year term beginning in April 2026. (GCIS)
As global multilateralism fractures and Africa confronts renewed contests over sovereignty, South Africa’s return to the African Union Peace and Security Council (AU PSC) raises a deeper question: will it speak in the inherited language of empire, or help author a new continental future?
South Africa’s department of international relations and cooperation announced its ascension to the African Union Peace and Security Council for a two-year term beginning in April 2026. In reading the statement issued on 11 February 2026, I was struck by a mixture of recognition and trepidation. Recognition, because the language was immediately familiar, referencing “stability,” “terrorism,” “violent extremism” and the defence of “constitutional order”, phrases that have long formed the grammar of post-Cold War and post-9/11 diplomacy.
But I felt a sense of unease because this vocabulary now feels unmistakably archaic in a world undergoing profound geopolitical and moral transformation. These terms were forged by Western powers within a security paradigm preoccupied with Islamophobia, containment and the external management of the Global South.
It was exported into our lexicon and policy formulations through manipulated and enforced multilateral engagements in which we were made to believe the rule of law and good governance could be achieved. Repeating these terms in 2026, without interrogation, risks tethering our foreign policy and Africa’s future to frameworks that were designed outside the continent for a different era — one that neither resolved injustice nor delivered genuine peace.
If these are the foundations upon which South Africa seeks to embark on its two-year term at the AU PSC, it may set a tone of ineptitude rather than meaningful success in addressing the multitude of peace and security challenges on the continent.
This tension is not uniquely South African. It echoes a wider continental and global moment captured in recent reflections by former president Thabo Mbeki on the urgent task of shaping a just world order. His argument rests on a simple but unsettling truth: the existing international system has neither delivered justice nor sustained legitimacy and cannot be repaired through rhetoric alone. If that diagnosis is correct, then Africa’s participation in global governance cannot remain confined to procedural inclusion within structures whose authority is visibly fraying.
What is collapsing before us is not only a global security order but the credibility of the language that sustained it. The post-9/11 diplomatic lexicon, absorbed wholesale into African multilateral discourse, was never neutral. It emerged from a system designed to discipline the Global South, secure resource flows and legitimise selective intervention under the banner of counterterrorism and constitutionalism. In its very architecture, it was meant to continue to subjugate the Global South and any aspirations for true liberation. Repeating this vocabulary as we assume a leadership position on the continent signals a deeper diplomatic inertia and a depletion of intellectual confidence, where rehearsed Western security jargon is recycled in place of the rigorous, independent thinking required to speak from an authentically Africa-centred horizon.
Africa does not suffer primarily from a deficit of “stability”. It suffers from extraction, militarised patronage, externally financed economies, elite impunity and borders that were never meant to produce justice. Treating these structural realities as secondary to procedural order has allowed diplomacy to become theatrical; illustrious statements are issued, troops deployed, crises managed, while the conditions that generate violence and inequality remain intact.
The ritual condemnation of “unconstitutional changes of government” exposes this hollowness most clearly. Constitutional rule matters. But constitutional language cannot be invoked in abstraction from political legitimacy, social justice and sovereignty, nor from the desperate populist demand for transformation that so often erupts beneath moments of political upheaval. Across Africa, waves of popular uprising have expressed a rejection of stagnant political orders sustained by inequality, repression and external patronage. The aftermath of the Arab Spring and more recent political overturns in parts of West Africa, reveal how swiftly revolutionary energy can be contained or redirected when unpalatable to the powers that be but also show how, in some contexts, it has taken on an explicitly decolonial character.
In sections of the Sahel and wider West Africa, new authorities in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, while rising to power through what has been perceived as “unconstitutional” means, have framed their emergence not merely as military intervention but as a rejection of entrenched dependency: the expulsion of long-standing foreign military presences, the renegotiation of security partnerships and the pursuit of regional alliances outside traditional blocs that were themselves shaped by earlier geopolitical hierarchies. In prevailing diplomatic narratives, such states are frequently cast as delinquents or rogue actors departing from accepted constitutional and regional norms and condemned for not falling in line.
But it also begs the question of whether those who condemn the departure from the status quo are themselves fearful of similar emulations closer to home. Instead of trying to straightjacket the situation with condemnations of unconstitutional practices, it is time the continent confronted the malaise plaguing the region. It is worth asking whether this apparent delinquency may also represent a necessary perforation in an inherited political order, one through which older, constrained notions of sovereignty are being contested and potentially redefined. Whether these trajectories ultimately yield democratic renewal or reproduce new forms of authoritarianism remains uncertain. What is clear, however, is that they cannot be understood through a single procedural lens. They represent contests over sovereignty, resources and political dignity; struggles rooted as much in the unfinished business of decolonisation as in contemporary governance failure.
A diplomatic framework that collapses these distinct historical and political processes into a uniform category of illegitimacy risks obscuring the very dynamics required for meaningful analysis and, in doing so, limits the possibility of effective continental response.
South Africa’s diplomacy today reveals a quieter but more consequential tension: the distance between the principles it proclaims and the realities it must navigate. Like many middle powers, it sustains relationships across sharply different political systems in the name of dialogue, stability and continental cohesion. Such engagement is often necessary. But necessity does not remove the obligation of clarity. When commitments to constitutionalism, justice and democratic legitimacy are not consistently reflected in conduct, credibility is not suddenly lost; it is gradually depleted. The real question is therefore not whether pragmatism is justified but whether South Africa can align its engagements more visibly with the values it claims to defend.
The same clarity is required when assessing South Africa’s earlier service on the AU PSC. Its record includes genuine efforts in mediation, negotiated settlement and support for continental peace initiatives — contributions informed in part by its own transition from conflict to constitutional democracy. Yet several long-running crises across the continent also expose the limits of both South African influence and the wider peace architecture within which it operates. Too often, political processes stalled, security gains proved temporary and regional or international presence failed to translate into lasting settlement. Current realities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the layered insecurity in Mozambique make plain that unresolved political economies of conflict continue to outrun the diplomatic and military tools meant to address them.
These continental constraints mirror a deeper global fracture. The multilateral system is not merely weakened; it is openly discredited. International law is enforced selectively. Institutions meant to prevent catastrophe are paralysed by power. Wars unfold in full view of the world with little consequence for the powerful and overwhelming punishment for the weak. To describe this order as functional requires a suspension of reality. The system is not reforming. It is decomposing.
In such a moment, incremental language becomes a form of avoidance and blissful ignorance. Africa does not need gentler rhetoric or nostalgic invocations of solidarity alone. It needs political, economic and intellectual agency exercised with clarity of purpose. Peace and security cannot remain diplomatic abstractions while foreign bases expand, neocolonial powers continue to perpetrate arbitrary and unilateral attacks on the continent in the name of protecting their security against indigenous Africans (as in the case of the US attacks on Nigeria and Somalia), proxy wars multiply, mineral corridors dictate violence and external actors finance instability for profit.
A serious African peace doctrine would begin with unsentimental truths:
- Peace cannot coexist with economic systems structured for perpetual extraction
- Security cannot rest indefinitely on external military guarantees
- Constitutional legitimacy cannot endure without material justice
- Mediation without leverage rarely produces settlement
- Neutrality in the face of structural violence ultimately protects the status quo
Yet critique without horizon is insufficient. The deeper question is what kind of world Africa intends to help build as the old order recedes. A transformed multilateral future, if it is to carry legitimacy, must be anchored in the emergence of a developed, prosperous and sovereign Africa as a central pillar of global stability.
Such a vision would place African industrialisation, technological leadership, food sovereignty and financial autonomy at the heart of peace and security itself. A continent capable of generating shared prosperity is far less vulnerable to conflict economies, external manipulation and militarised dependency. Multilateralism, in this frame, would cease to resemble hierarchy masked as cooperation and instead reflect genuine plurality shaped by regions able to determine their own futures.
In that world, Africa would not approach global institutions seeking validation or assistance. It would enter them as a decisive economic and political force, reshaping trade, security, climate governance and international law through the weight of its development and the clarity of its collective interests. Peace would no longer mean the containment of African instability but the global consequences of African success.
South Africa’s return to the AU PSC therefore poses a question that echoes the unease of that opening encounter with its official language. The department often enjoys the high-stakes optics of apparent success on the international stage, yet this moment demands scrutiny beyond ceremony.
It remains to be seen whether South Africa enters this influential forum already encumbered by inherited foreign ideologies that delegitimise indigenous struggles through the language of “terrorism” and “violent extremism” — terms that have historically enabled and justified external military intervention on the continent — or whether it is prepared to revolutionise its approach to peace and security in ways that are intellectually independent, materially grounded and unmistakably Africa-centred.
The measure of South Africa’s term will not be the elegance of its diplomacy but whether it helps move Africa from managed relevance within a fading system to decisive authorship of the world that follows.
Zeenat Adam is a former diplomat and international relations analyst based in South Africa.