The Policy Center for the New South (PCNS) presented, Tuesday June 10, 2026 in Rabat, the tenth edition of its Annual Report on the Geopolitics of Africa (RAGA)a collective work bringing together this year twenty-six contributions from authors from sixteen African countries, six more than last year. Hosted by Abdelhak BassouSenior Fellow and publishing director, the session brought together five contributors around a common question: howAfrica does it position itself in the restructuring of world power, and how do its states arbitrate between security, development, sovereignty and regional integration?
The anniversary set the tone. “It’s a bit of an adult for a work like this,” observed Mr. Bassou, who places the report with a constant aim: to make it “the platform given to Africans to recover the discourse on their continent.” A discourse which, in the aftermath of independence, “was still monopolized by the old colonial powers”, and that it is, according to him, “the 21st century especially” which has seen Africans seek to “reappropriate” it.
An “African paradigm of peace”
Premier à intervene, Hachem El Moummydiplomat and researcher international relationsdefended a paradigm linking security and development. For decades, “the dominant narrative has reduced Africa to areas of deficit: deficit of governance, security, stability”, he recalled, and the response has almost always been the same: “We send soldiersof the Peacekeepersexperts, we impose conditionalities.” A “sequential” logic, stabilize first, develop then, which he considers ineffective: “It was a bit like treating pneumonia with aspirin: we bring down the fever, but the disease remains there.” With this approach, he opposes the idea that peace, security and development are “mutually constitutive”. The paradigm, he emphasizes, has gone beyond the theoretical stage: it appears in the constitutive act of theAfrican Union and in Agenda 2063, and experienced a “consecration” in 2019, “under the Moroccan presidency of the Peace and Security Council”, extended by the “Tangier processHAS”. Mr. El Moummy, however, calls for lucidity: “70% of the operational budget for the operations of theAfrican Union comes from external donors”, and the UN Security Council “remains the body which legitimizes the majority of interventions”. His conclusion: “The challenge is no longer to convince the world of the relevance of this nexus: this debate has already been won. The challenge is to make it happen.”
The thrift store, “geoeconomic object”
The contributor described an “accelerated textile deindustrialization”, the cotton SICAM only accounts for 5% of the market, and a sector where “more than 150,000 people live from the resale of used clothes”, in “jobs without added value, without protection and without industrial future”, “breeding ground for social frustrations, even for radicalization”. His proposal: make Cameroon a regional sorting and recycling hub. In support, a pilot project from the International Labor Office Doualawhere “locally sorted bales sell for thirty times more than those imported raw”. “A young person who works in a textile recycling workshop is not a young person who joins violent informal networks,” he argued, pleading for “a model of peace through industry.”
“On the table, not on the menu”
Came from Nairobi, We cut MarvinDirector of Legal Affairs and Policy, Executive Office of the President Kenyasummarized his thesis with a formula destined to spread throughout the rest of the exchanges: theAfrica must “put itself on the table rather than being on the menu”. A multipolar world would be “better for Africa than the bipolar and unipolar systems have ever been,” he argued, but this optimism “presupposes that Africa speaks with one voice.” He pointed out a number of unprecedented sources of simultaneous tension “in the Sahel à la Horn of Africa», the montée du terrorisme comme «menace première» and, «au même moment», the story of «la réponse diplomatique collective».
Sidi Mohamed Sidi Fall Ould Oumeirlawyer and professor of Mauritanian law, for his part included his contribution in the Moroccan Royal initiatives aroundAtlantic. The Mauritania“the first Atlantic country neighboring the Kingdom”, occupies, according to him, a “pivot” position, in the name of a “positive peace” understood as “the cessation of hostilities plus an economic development plan”. He cited the Moroccan contribution of “3.3 billion dollars” to the G5 Sahel priority program and the opening of a second commercial crossing to the Mauritanian border, “with an investment of 215 million dirhams”.
AI, “power multiplier”
The researcher insisted on the risk represented by the use of these armaments by non-state actors “who do not obey any rule of international law”, with possible consequences “on the security of civilian populations”. The primary challenge, in his eyes, is not access but control: “Few African countries have the potential and the capacity to control value chains.” Hence a risk of “dependencies” and “asymmetries”. Asked by a participant about the comparison with the advent of the Internet, she replied that analysts describe theIA as “a total rupture, almost assimilated to the industrial revolution”, and that the capacity to take advantage of it supposes “complete ecosystems, which range from research à la formationtechnological mastery, startupsHAS”. His warning: “The countries that manage to bring about this ecosystem will make the best use of AI. The others will be consumers.”
In closing, Mr. Bassou noted the convergences that appeared “without our having consulted”: the need to reexamine the place of Africa in the world, thecircular economypositive peace, the demand for a common voice. So many themes which, according to him, come together in a pan-African thought in the process of moving “from a theoretical and ideological conception to a philosophy of governance”.
