From Protection to Positioning: How Africa Should Navigate a Fragmenting World Order, By Collins Nweke

A message from an old acquaintance recently landed in a public forum that I share with friends and associates. It was provocative, sweeping in places, and unmistakably pessimistic about the direction of the world. Its author sees a resurgence of imperial power, a West increasingly willing to pursue its interests without regard to the consequences elsewhere, a Europe weakened by war and economic dislocation, and an international system progressively abandoning the cooperative instincts that helped rebuild prosperity after the Second World War.

There are parts of that diagnosis with which I disagree, sometimes substantially. History is rarely served well when complicated conflicts are reduced to a contest between wholly innocent and wholly guilty camps. Neither is Africa well served when every contemporary failure is explained primarily through what others have done to us. But the message ended with a question that deserves considerably more attention than the disagreements preceding it: How should we prepare and protect ourselves?

My answer begins by changing one word. Africa must certainly protect itself against the consequences of an increasingly fragmented world. But protection is no longer enough. Africa must position itself. That distinction may prove fundamental to how the continent navigates the emerging global order.

The World Has Changed Again

The age of uncomplicated globalisation is receding. Trade remains enormous. Indeed, in Key statistics and trends in international trade 2025, UN Trade and Development reports that global trade in goods and services exceeded $35 trillion in 2025. But beneath that headline number, something more profound is happening: geopolitical tensions, industrial policy, tariffs, sanctions, national-security considerations and technological rivalry are restructuring global value chains. Fragmentation and regionalisation are increasingly defining the trading system. The organising principle of the international economy is gradually shifting from a relatively simple question of where can this be produced most efficiently?  towards another: where can this be produced most securely, and by whom?

Supply chains are being redesigned around strategic alliances. Energy is geopolitics. Semiconductors are geopolitics. So too do critical minerals, food security, artificial intelligence, shipping routes, data infrastructure and even payment systems increasingly carry strategic significance. The IMF recently described the emerging environment starkly: geopolitics is increasingly displacing globalisation as an organising philosophy, with economic decisions becoming subordinated to strategic calculations and supply chains being redesigned around security as well as efficiency. For Africa, the danger is obvious. A continent that entered the previous global economic order largely as a supplier of raw materials risks entering the next one in exactly the same position.

We Should Be Careful About Simple Villains

There is a temptation, particularly given Africa’s colonial history, to interpret this moment primarily through the language of renewed Western imperialism. That temptation is understandable. It is also insufficient. There are legitimate criticisms to make of Western foreign policy, military interventions, unequal trading relationships and the architecture of international finance. Developing economies continue to face structural obstacles to moving upwards through global value chains. Tariff structures, for example, can make it easier to export some raw materials than the processed products manufactured from them.

Europe itself must confront difficult questions about whether a fortress mentality  on migration, trade and security, can ultimately substitute for building prosperity and stability in its wider neighbourhood. But recognising these contradictions should not require us to rewrite every geopolitical conflict into a morality play in which the West is invariably the aggressor and everyone opposing it becomes an anti-imperialist protagonist.

Russia pursues Russian interests. China pursues Chinese interests. The United States pursues American interests. Europe, however imperfectly coordinated, pursues European interests. India, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and the emerging middle powers increasingly pursue their interests with considerable strategic confidence. Why should Africa be the exception? The great strategic error would be to spend the coming decades debating which external power loves Africa most. Great powers do not organise foreign policy around love. They organise it around interests. Africa must learn to do the same.

The Post-War Question

My acquaintance raised another question that deserves serious reflection. If the post-Second World War economic architecture helped rebuild Europe and generated extraordinary prosperity, why was a comparable developmental machine not deployed across Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America? There is considerable historical merit in asking that question. The international economic architecture that emerged from Bretton Woods was created in a world in which much of Africa and the Caribbean remained under colonial rule. European reconstruction became a geopolitical priority. Development elsewhere did not initially enjoy comparable urgency. But we should be careful about where we take that argument.

Colonial extraction matters. Unequal terms of trade matter. So too does  debt structures, agricultural protectionism, international financial governance, and capital flight. But African governance matters too. So do corruption, weak institutions, policy inconsistency, conflict, infrastructure deficits, fragmented markets, poor education systems and the inability of political elites in too many countries to convert natural wealth into broad-based prosperity. African agency cannot mean demanding recognition for our achievements while outsourcing responsibility for our failures.

A serious African response to the emerging world must therefore reject two equally disabling propositions. The first is that the international system is fundamentally fair and Africa’s condition is entirely self-inflicted. The second is that the international system explains everything and Africa is principally the victim of forces beyond its control. Neither proposition is credible.

From Endowment to Power

Africa is not poor in assets. It possesses extraordinary mineral resources, enormous renewable-energy potential, agricultural land, a young population, strategic maritime routes, a rapidly expanding digital economy and one of the world’s most consequential future consumer markets. The problem is not simply what Africa possesses. It is what Africa can convert. This is the distinction between asset endowment and performed power. Possessing cobalt does not constitute industrial power if somebody else manufactures the batteries. Producing cocoa does not constitute economic power if somebody else captures the premium from chocolate. Exporting crude petroleum while importing refined products is not energy power. Having hundreds of millions of young people is not demographic power if economies cannot educate, employ and productively deploy them. Hosting sunshine, wind and critical minerals does not automatically make Africa a green-energy power. Resources become power only after they pass through institutions, infrastructure, technology, capital, skills, productive capacity and strategic leadership.

The statistics remain uncomfortable. UNCTAD reports that 76.7 per cent of Africa’s merchandise exports in 2025 were primary goods. Across developing countries more broadly, two-thirds remained commodity-dependent during 2021–2023, with dependence particularly pronounced in parts of Western and Middle Africa. This is the strategic vulnerability that Africa should worry about as much as any geopolitical rivalry.

The First Positioning Strategy: Trade With Ourselves

Africa cannot credibly speak of strategic autonomy while its economies remain better connected to former colonial markets than to neighbouring African economies. Intra-African trade remains around 14 per cent of Africa’s total trade, compared with roughly 60 per cent within the European Union and around 50 per cent within Asia. That is not simply a trade statistic. It is a geopolitical vulnerability. The African Continental Free Trade Area must therefore be understood as more than another integration project. It is potentially an instrument of strategic sovereignty. An integrated African market allows manufacturers to scale. It makes regional value chains possible. It strengthens bargaining power with external partners. It provides some insulation from global shocks and gives African businesses markets closer to home.

UNCTAD estimates the potential continental marketplace represented by AfCFTA at approximately $3.4 trillion and argues that stronger regional trade networks can reduce vulnerability to external shocks.  But treaties do not trade. Businesses do. A free-trade agreement without transport corridors, efficient ports, interoperable payments, predictable customs regimes, affordable electricity and functioning border infrastructure will remain an aspiration dressed as an institution. The next phase of African integration must therefore move from diplomatic signatures to commercial execution.

The Second Strategy: Stop Exporting Tomorrow’s Industries

The global energy transition presents Africa with perhaps the clearest test of whether lessons have been learned. Critical minerals required for batteries, electric vehicles and renewable-energy technologies are found in significant quantities across the continent. The temptation will be enormous to repeat the familiar model: extract, export, collect royalties, import finished technology. That would amount to financing another industrial revolution elsewhere with African resources. The better proposition is not that every African country must manufacture everything. That would be economically unrealistic. Rather, Africa should deliberately negotiate for regional value chains.

Mining agreements should increasingly ask: What processing takes place locally? What infrastructure accompanies extraction? What skills are transferred? What research capacity is developed? What African suppliers participate? What percentage of value remains in the economy after the resource leaves the ground?

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD has been making essentially this argument: the energy transition can either reproduce old patterns of commodity dependence or become a catalyst for structural transformation.  That choice will not be made in Washington, Brussels, Beijing or Moscow. It will be made principally in African capitals.

The Third Strategy: Practise Multi-Alignment, Not Non-Alignment

The Cold War gave us the language of non-alignment. The emerging era requires something more active. I would call it strategic multi-alignment. Africa should cooperate with Europe where European partnership advances African objectives. Cooperate with China where Chinese capital, technology or markets serve African development. Work with the United States where interests converge. Engage India, Brazil, Türkiye, Japan, the Gulf states and emerging economies on their merits. And cooperate with Russia where legitimate interests align. But no relationship should become an ideological inheritance. The relevant question should always be: What African objective does this partnership advance? That is not neutrality. It is agency. Strategic multi-alignment means refusing to inherit somebody else’s enemies while being equally unwilling to inherit somebody else’s dependencies.

The Fourth Strategy: Economic Diplomacy Must Become Development Infrastructure

African diplomacy will also have to change. Too many diplomatic missions are still evaluated by activity rather than national value: meetings held, ceremonies attended, delegations received and communiqués issued. In a fragmented global economy, diplomacy must increasingly function as economic infrastructure. An embassy should know where investment capital is moving. It should understand emerging industrial policies in its host country. It should identify supply-chain opportunities before competitors do. It should connect domestic businesses with foreign markets, universities with research partnerships, governments with technology providers and investors with bankable opportunities.

The diplomatic conversion chain should be clear: Strategic Priority → Diplomatic Engagement → Opportunity Identification → Domestic Response → Implementation → Outcome → National Value. Without the domestic-response stage, even excellent diplomacy produces little. Africa therefore requires not simply more economic diplomacy but stronger conversion capacity between diplomatic opportunity and domestic execution.

The Fifth Strategy: The Diaspora Must Enter the Equation

Africa possesses another strategic asset that is still too often understood primarily through remittances: its diaspora. In a fragmented world, diaspora communities are not merely sources of foreign currency. They are embedded networks. They sit inside universities, businesses, financial institutions, technology companies, governments, professional associations and civil society across the world. They understand multiple regulatory systems. They possess language, cultural and commercial fluency across borders. They can identify opportunities before bureaucratic systems detect them. Properly organised, the diaspora provides Africa with something extraordinarily valuable: strategic vantage points inside competing global systems.

The question should therefore move beyond how much money Africans abroad send home. It should become: What knowledge, access, networks, capital and influence can they help convert into national and continental value?

Sovereignty Is Capacity

This brings us back to the original question: How should Africa protect itself? Not by retreating from the world. Not by searching for a benevolent superpower. Not by replacing Western dependence with Eastern dependence. Not by interpreting every international development through ideological loyalty. And certainly not by building African versions of the fortresses we criticise elsewhere.

Africa protects itself by becoming harder to marginalise. By producing more of what it consumes, processing more of what it extracts, trading more with itself, educating its young people for the industries that are emerging rather than those that are disappearing, building infrastructure that connects African economies, mobilising domestic capital, using its diaspora strategically, strengthening institutions,  integrating markets, and by negotiating internationally from clearly defined interests. That is what sovereignty increasingly means. Sovereignty is not isolation. Sovereignty is capacity.

From Protection to Positioning

The world ahead may indeed be rougher than the one many of us imagined at the end of the Cold War. The multilateral system is under strain. Economic nationalism is returning. Wars are reshaping alliances. Technology is redistributing power. Climate change is transforming development choices. And geopolitical competition will increasingly reach into trade, investment, finance and natural resources.

Africa cannot control these forces. But it can control how it enters them. Perhaps, therefore, the question before us is not simply how Africa protects itself from a fragmenting world. It is how Africa positions itself within that world. For too much of modern history, Africa has entered global transformations principally as territory to be contested, resources to be extracted, markets to be accessed or votes to be assembled in international institutions. The coming transformation must be different. Africa should enter it as a negotiating actor. Neither pro-West nor anti-West. Neither pro-East nor anti-East.

Pro-African interest.

The safest place in a fragmenting world is not necessarily inside somebody else’s camp. It is to possess enough economic strength, institutional competence and diplomatic capacity to engage every camp. And doing so confidently, selectively and on terms that advance your own development. That is the shift Africa now needs: from protection to positioning;
from alignment to agency;
from resource possession to value creation;
and from being acted upon by history to becoming an author of it.