Africa & Global Power

T he term “Global South” has become one of the most used and least examined phrases in contemporary international relations. It appears in AU summit communiqués, UN General Assembly speeches, academic journals, and newspaper editorials with a frequency that suggests consensus on its meaning. That consensus is largely illusory. The Global South is not a defined institution, a formal alliance, a shared ideology, or a coherent economic bloc. It is a political shorthand for a diverse collection of countries that share a historical experience of colonialism and marginalisation in the Western-designed international order, and that are increasingly asserting the right to shape that order’s next iteration on terms more favourable to their own interests. For Africa, the Global South framing matters because it provides the continent with a discursive and sometimes institutional home for its demands: for debt restructuring, for climate finance, for permanent UN Security Council representation, ...

  W hen the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure in January 2026, the immediate global conversation centred on escalation risk, nuclear proliferation, and the future of the Middle East order. Africa was not central to that conversation. It rarely is when wars begin in other regions. But within weeks of the opening strikes, the war’s consequences were landing with full force across the continent: in fuel pump prices in Nairobi, in foreign exchange reserves in Accra, in port congestion in Djibouti, and in the diplomatic cables of governments suddenly being asked by Washington, Beijing, and Tehran alike to declare where they stood. The 2026 Iran war is not an African war. But it is reshaping African economies, African security environments, and African diplomatic positions in ways that will persist long after any ceasefire. Understanding those consequences requires looking beyond the Middle East theatre and examining wh...

B y 2050, Africa will be home to approximately 2.5 billion people, roughly one quarter of the global population. By 2100, the median projection puts the continent’s population at between 3.5 and 4 billion, more than any other region on Earth. [1] These numbers are not projections in the speculative sense. They are the almost certain demographic consequence of fertility rates that, while declining, remain substantially higher than any other major world region, combined with significant reductions in child mortality that have sharply increased the proportion of children who survive to working age. The political and analytical conversation about what this demographic trajectory means for Africa oscillates between two poles. The optimist framing, dominant in development economics and international investment literature since roughly 2010, presents Africa’s youth bulge as a demographic dividend: the economic windfall that accrues to a society when a large cohort of working-age adults sup...