Beyond tokenism — can Africa rewrite the rules of global power?

Africa clearly wants seats at the table – permanent UN Security Council representation, a greater voice in international financial institutions and meaningful participation in global decision-making generally.

But the continent’s diplomatic strategy has always involved more than just seeking inclusion. Africa has a long history of challenging exclusion and reshaping global norms, starting with decolonisation movements that helped universalise self-determination as a right for all peoples.

This inspired liberation movements globally and drew early attention to unacceptable double standards in international politics.

This pattern of norm-making continues today. Nigeria’s recent success in leading 125 countries to move global tax authority from the OECD to the UN exemplifies Africa’s broader approach: when existing institutions don’t serve African interests, move the conversation to forums where African voices actually matter.

As the 2024 Amani-Namibia High-Level Dialogue argues, Africa must be seen not as a “rule-taker” but as a “norm-maker”, shaping the values and priorities that underpin global governance. While pursuing pathways for representation in world decision-making bodies, Africa’s real potential for multilateral leadership lies in reshaping existing institutions, their operating principles and frameworks and fostering new ones where needed.

As the current order falters, this creates a rare opportunity for Africa not just to gain entry to global structures, but to lead in redefining them – rewriting rules that advance a more just, inclusive vision of global power.

Yet the continent clearly grapples with governance challenges – corruption, institutional weaknesses, fragile social contracts and political instability – often deeply intertwined with global systems designed to extract rather than develop.

This paradox defines African leadership: the continent’s authority to challenge global injustice comes precisely from experiencing its effects.

But here are critical questions: can a continent shaped by centuries of exploitation and ongoing marginalisation by global structures credibly lead global governance reform? And is there likely to be agreement on the type of multilateralism Africa wants, that will support the shaping of a rules-based order that better serves humanity’s (and Africa’s) needs?

Beyond symbolic representation, history reveals how Africa’s positions and efforts reflect a desire to shape agendas, reframe priorities and pursue accountability, and to actively redefine global norms and frameworks.

This vision supports the pursuit of justice and wellbeing outcomes for humanity. It stretches beyond UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ vision of networked, inclusive multilateralism, orienting towards structural transformation and pluriversal design that respects diverse worldviews, legal traditions and lived histories.

At its heart, it seeks a system grounded not in precedent and power, but in equity and legitimacy.

Realising this vision in and through the global order, however, is not straightforward. But it is also not impossible.

From resistance to agenda setting

Africa’s influence on global norms often goes unrecognised because it operates outside formal power structures. Yet the continent has repeatedly reshaped international standards through persistent advocacy and moral leadership.

African independence movements in the 1960s redefined self-determination and helped dismantle colonial empires globally. The anti-apartheid struggle established apartheid as a crime against humanity through a 1973 convention and later the 2002 Rome Statute, demonstrating how African-led resistance can foster international legal architectures that continue to shape global justice today.

The Treaty of Pelindaba demonstrated Africa’s commitment to peace over power politics. Despite the continent controlling 20% of global uranium reserves, Africa established itself as nuclear weapon-free in 2009.

More recently, African leadership achieved a stunning victory in global tax reform when 125 countries backed Nigeria’s UN resolution to move international tax discussions from the OECD to the UN, challenging wealthy nations’ control over global economic governance.

South Africa’s ongoing genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) continues in this tradition. Framed as part of a broader decolonial justice agenda, it echoes Namibia’s 1971 ICJ challenge to South Africa’s trusteeship that helped cement legal precedent against apartheid.

South Africa’s ICJ case is inspiring and strengthening a growing global justice movement, exposing double standards in international politics and demonstrating legal and moral leadership on a world stage.

Africa has also advanced subsidiarity principles through the African Peace and Security Architecture, where regional economic communities play a central role in conflict prevention and response. This decentralised model, recently acknowledged in UNSC Resolution 2719, reflects Africa’s normative leadership in pushing global governance to recognise regional authority and context-driven solutions.

The strategic moment: A multi-track approach

Africa’s growing visibility in multilateral fora needs to now translate into structural leverage. The African Union’s Ezulwini Consensus demands two permanent African seats with veto power on the UN Security Council, and restrictions on veto use during mass atrocities.

But this is just one piece of a broader strategy. Africa’s rotational, non-permanent seats are without real decision-making power despite Africa constituting 28% of UN member states. The 2024 US proposal to allocate African states permanent UNSC seats without veto rights underscores tokenistic engagement in the highest decision-making body that has allocated 80% of its agenda to African issues in the past decade.

While pursuing these traditional reforms, Africa is simultaneously building alternative pathways to influence. Through BRICS, African states like South Africa and Egypt are helping construct economic architectures that challenge Western financial dominance.

The Non-Aligned Movement, where Africa holds significant influence and Uganda is a current chair, champions Global South solidarity on issues from climate justice to debt relief.

The G-77, with its African majority, provides a platform for collective action that bypasses Western vetoes and conditions.

The presidency of Cameroon’s Philemon Yang at the 79th UN General Assembly offers another strategic window. Yang, an experienced diplomat and advocate of multilateral inclusivity, can help operationalise Africa’s priorities in global forums – ie, reforming the global financial architecture and implementing the Pact for the Future and related youth and digital compacts to deliver results for Africans.

South Africa’s 2025 G20 presidency represents a crucial opportunity. Following successful Global South presidencies by Indonesia, India and Brazil, this moment allows Africa to consolidate a norm-making role in global economic governance. The AU’s recent admission to the G20 must translate into embedded influence across working groups and agenda-setting platforms, infusing critical African priorities. The AU’s recent full admission to the G20 was historic – but presence must be matched with power.

AU-led norm entrepreneurship is needed to cohere African positions. Agenda 2063, often treated as a domestic development road map, is actually a continental diplomatic doctrine affirming a vision of people-centred governance, accountable leadership and shared prosperity. This challenges the dominant rules-based order paradigm prioritising state sovereignty and GDP metrics over equity, dignity and sustainability.

The establishment of regular, high-level trilateral dialogues between the G20, UN, and AU could also cohere and anchor Africa’s voice in the governance of critical issues for the continent, including global finance, debt sustainability, peace financing and climate justice.

These dialogues could create a new centre of gravity for equitable global agenda-setting, grounded in Africa’s normative leadership and lived experience.

These aren’t technocratic fixes and proposals – they’re mechanisms for embedding transformative principles and policy options into global governance architecture.

Strategic positioning and narrative power

To lead normatively, Africa must also lead narratively. The dominant portrayal of Africa as a crisis-ridden victim must give way to recognition of Africa as a strategic actor with the moral authority and institutional creativity to reshape the global order.

Africa’s legal and institutional interventions must be matched by mechanisms that confront disinformation and adverse narratives that disempower Africans and undermine their leadership pathways.

Having more influence on the shaping and framing of norms can be supported by an AU-led Platform on Norm Coherence and Multilateral Integrity, which could track and respond to the selective application of international law, with a Special Envoy amplifying Africa’s voice in norm-setting spaces.

A UN Special Rapporteur on Global Governance Inequality would bring critical scrutiny to how global rules are made and who they benefit.

But global leadership requires internal credibility. Corruption, elite capture and fragmentation continue to undermine Africa’s normative claims and require persistent tackling. The AU’s African Peer Review Mechanism shows that African leaders can and do hold themselves accountable to collective standards. Strengthening such efforts is critical.

The test isn’t whether Africa can perfect its internal governance – no region has. It’s whether the continent can leverage its proven capacity for norm-making, embedding transformative principles and policies into global structures while building alternative frameworks that better serve humanity.

The global order isn’t collapsing – it’s being quietly and incrementally reconstructed by those it was designed to exclude.

Africa isn’t waiting for permission to lead this process.

The question is whether established powers will adapt to this pluriversal reality – or find themselves increasingly irrelevant in a future the continent is already helping to build. DM

Prof Erin McCandless has three decades of experience working to advance inclusive political settlements in 25 countries across continents. She currently serves as acting director of the Qatar-South Africa Centre for Peace and Intercultural Understanding at the University of Johannesburg and a senior advisor at the Centre for Mediation in Africa at the University of Pretoria.

This article draws from a talk Prof McCandless gave at the African Research Network for Global Governance Innovation (Anumdi) in Kenya, 21-23 June 2025, and the inspirational discussions among the group present, notably Tim Murithi, Alanna O’Malley, David Passarelli, Mikatekiso Kubayi and Richard Ponzio.