The international order is shifting: African countries have an opportunity to reshape global power relations

African countries must work collectively to seize opportunities in new digital and green economies where the continent’s critical minerals are so important.

Carlos Lopes, Professor at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town

13 August 2025

For too long, Africa’s agency has been exercised defensively: managing expectations, preserving stability, reacting to external scripts. The continent has copied political systems from other countries and prioritised economic choices that would meet external obligations, such as repaying debt.

This posture was understandable immediately following independence in African states. At that time, the world was shaped by cold war constraints and conditions imposed by those who provided aid and set up structural adjustment programmes.

But we are now in a different moment. The international order is shifting fast. Multilateralism is fraying. Former rule-makers are bypassing the rules. For instance, World Trade Organisation rules are no longer respected, and international law is questioned by powerful countries that helped shape it.

The narrative of “order” has collapsed into a contest of survival and influence. The most important drivers of value creation (turning basic resources into more valuable goods) are concentrated in a few powerful countries. They use their influence to impose rules on more vulnerable countries on issues as diverse as tax regimes, data control or green taxonomy (the definition of what is considered to be green investment).

I’m an economist who specialises in climate change and governance, with a long background at the United Nations and the African Union. I believe this disarray is a crack in the system wide enough to let new forms of agency through.

This is a moment that demands clarity, not consensus. It demands that Africa finally break with the legacy of managed dependency and embrace the messier, harder, but ultimately more liberating path of building for ourselves.

Africa must use its blank slate as an asset

Africa, unlike many regions, is not anchored to legacy power. It has little institutional interest in defending the old order. It is not over-invested in a global financial system that unfairly penalises it. For example, the United Nations Development Programme found that 16 African countries paid an additional US$74.5 billion in excess interest between 2000 and 2020 because credit rating agencies had inflated their risk assessments.

Africa is not bound by post-industrial lock-ins that tie economies to fossil fuels and prevent the growth of green industry. It is not constrained by a declining population, nor paralysed by nostalgia for a geopolitical past.

This, in this moment, is an unspoken advantage. Because when the old norms unravel, those who have had to navigate around them are best placed to write the new ones. Africa has been pushed out to the margins in global economic and technological governance. This means it has little to lose by experimenting. That is a form of freedom. But only if it is seized, not managed.

Central to this shift is technology – not as a neutral tool, but as a force actively reshaping power.

Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, synthetic biology and blockchain systems are redrawing what is possible. They also make inequality worse and increase the risk of new forms of exclusion. Africa cannot afford to be a bystander in this transformation. Nor can the continent pretend to leapfrog without foundational investments in infrastructure, data governance and skills.

Yet again, Africa’s blank slate is an asset. Only around 40% of the population is currently online compared to 66% globally. That means digital policy can still be shaped. Africa can frame its own approach to AI ethics, digital taxation, cybersecurity and local content.

Time to stop mimicking the global north

In times of uncertainty, there is a temptation to cling to what is familiar. For Africa, this often means mimicking “best practices” from systems that are now faltering. What we are witnessing in many parts of the global north is not best practice – it is structural exhaustion.

The US is navigating intense political polarisation. It risks repeated governmental shutdowns and challenges to its democratic institutions. Europe’s consensus politics are strained by far-right surges and incoherent migration policies.

The G20, meant to be a stabilising anchor, now struggles to agree even on basic communiqués. Member states of the European Union conclude a trade deal with the US, only to disagree among themselves on the deal a day later.

In this context, it is not in Africa’s interests to look for validation from traditional centres of power.

To keep seeking a seat at the table, without questioning who built the table and why it no longer serves its purpose, is to forfeit the moment.

Africa must move forward as a collective

This does not mean rejecting global engagement. On the contrary, it means engaging with greater clarity, selectivity and ambition. It means designing financial instruments that align with Africa’s priorities, from climate resilience to agreeing on the kind of industrialisation that adds value to African commodities. It means investing in the capacity to regulate, tax and shape digital economies.

It means that African countries should negotiate collectively on trade and everything else – from green industrial policy to outer space.

To exercise agency is not simply to say “no”. It is to build. That is the hard part. Building requires time, coalition, experimentation, and a high tolerance for imperfection.

Africa must imagine its own institutions and then build them. That includes financial institutions that recycle domestic capital, such as the Africa50 infrastructure fund, or sovereign wealth strategies (state owned investment funds) to make the most of the continent’s critical minerals, rather than allowing them to be extracted for processing elsewhere.

For this to happen, new types of capacity are needed, such as expertise on legal arrangements, asset valuation or infrastructure structuring.

Currently, only 17 African countries have national development banks with sufficient scale to matter. That is not merely an institutional gap. It is an agency gap.

It means African countries are not exercising agency over their own development. Instead, they’re allowing too much of their interaction with the world to remain extractive: exporting raw materials, exporting labour, and exporting narratives of resilience such as special poverty programmes.

A new form of agency means turning inward, not by isolating Africa from the world but through Africa defining what success for the continent looks like.

Young Africans are not waiting. From fintech startups and off-grid energy innovators to artists and policy activists, they are reshaping the continent’s aspirations. But their leadership needs more than visibility. It needs backing from governance systems that do not suffocate initiative with bureaucracy or dismiss creativity as naïveté.

Leadership in this context is not about standing on platforms. It is about redesigning platforms. Agency is not just about being represented in global conversations. It is about power: the ability to shape outcomes, not just endure them.

The current global disorder presents an opportunity for such power to be exercised in new ways. But the window will not stay open forever. The rules will be rewritten. The only question is: will Africa be one of the authors?

Carlos Lopes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

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