AU detachment fuels security collapse in Africa

The contrast is impossible to ignore. As the United Nations warned in its latest briefing to the AU, the continent is facing an unprecedented wave of insecurity—from the Sahel’s jihadist expansion to Sudan’s civil war, from eastern Congo’s fragmentation to the unresolved tensions inside Ethiopia itself.

Yet the AU’s headquarters remains firmly rooted in Addis Ababa, a city geographically and psychologically distant from the conflict belt stretching across the Sahel, the Horn, and Central Africa. The institution’s physical location has become a metaphor for its political posture: insulated, reactive, and increasingly irrelevant to the crises reshaping the continent. The AU’s detachment is no longer just a bureaucratic flaw. It is now a structural weakness driving Africa’s security collapse.