Recommitting to human security in Africa

PRETORIA : Last week, the United Nations Development Programme published its report,  'Advancing Human Security for a Resilient and Prosperous Africa' (for which I wrote a background paper). Human security – as first defined in the UNDP’s seminal 1994 Human Development Report – is an innovative post-Cold War framework that focuses on individuals, as opposed to nation-states. It has since led to a greater emphasis on protecting people from hunger, disease, repression, and conflicts that adversely affect health outcomes, aggravate food insecurity, and disrupt access to clean water.

The concept quickly gained traction in Africa, partly because the UNDP’s initial report was completed just weeks before the Rwandan genocide claimed 800,000 lives in 1994 – one of the worst failures of human security in recent history. The coincidence of timing helped focus attention on the need to protect individuals in distress, while the plethora of weak and vulnerable states in Africa underscored the pressing need to build an effective continental human-security architecture.

At the UN General Assembly in 2012, all African governments committed to upholding the principles of human security. But despite its importance for socio-economic development and crisis management, this perspective has faded in recent years. Today, African countries struggle to address the leading drivers of migration within and from the continent – including climate change, infectious diseases, and the growing digital divide – amid democratic backsliding and a fracturing of the global order. They would do well to remember that complex challenges require a human-security perspective, grounded in African experiences and values.

Though rarely acknowledged, African scholars and practitioners have played a crucial role in promoting human security as a way to improve governance, foster regional integration, and pursue effective development policies. In fact, efforts to develop an African human-security framework predate the UNDP’s 1994 report. In 1990, under the leadership of Nigerian technocrat Adebayo Adedeji, the UN Economic Commission for Africa drafted and adopted the African Charter for Popular Participation in Development and Transformation, which advanced a development paradigm rooted in citizen participation in popular and self-reliant initiatives.

In 1996, South Sudanese diplomat Francis Deng, then the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative on Internally Displaced Persons, developed the concept of “sovereignty as responsibility”, which shifted attention away from securing states to protecting people. Deng sought to operationalise his idea through his roles at the UN (he later served as Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide), often by convincing African and other governments to protect populations at risk and to manage diversity more effectively.

Deng recognised the perils of absolute sovereignty, arguing that governments should allow international humanitarian assistance alongside national efforts to help distressed populations. He also believed that the views of local people were just as important as those of national governments and powerful warlords when determining sovereignty during armed conflicts. Moreover, Deng distinguished between communalism, which in many parts of Africa enables relatives and elders to intervene uninvited in domestic disputes, and the prospect of foreign intervention in weak African states, which jeopardises the continent’s sovereignty.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, likewise opposed absolute sovereignty. In 1998, he warned his fellow leaders at the Organization of African Unity (OAU) summit that “we cannot abuse the concept of national sovereignty to deny the rest of the continent the right and duty to intervene when, behind those sovereign boundaries, people are being slaughtered to protect tyranny”.

The Tanzanian diplomat Salim Ahmed Salim, during his tenure as the OAU’s Secretary General between 1989 and 2001, famously called on the continent to transcend the traditional view of sovereignty by arguing that “every African is his brother’s keeper”. To manage conflict more effectively and prevent neocolonial interventions, Salim encouraged African policymakers to reformulate the principle of non-interference, so that it would better reflect the continent’s values of kinship and solidarity.

As a result, the Constitutive Act of the African Union, signed in 2000, was a radical departure from the OAU Charter’s rigid insistence on non-intervention. As Alpha Oumar Konaré, the first chair of the AU Commission, put it, the new body had moved “from non-intervention to non-indifference”, allowing it to intervene in case of egregious human-rights abuses and unconstitutional changes of government.

Similar shifts were occurring at the global level, often spurred by African leaders. UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 'An Agenda for Peace', which set out a post-Cold War framework for peacebuilding, declared that “the time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty … has passed; its theory was never matched by reality”. His successor, Kofi A. Annan, published a 2005 report, 'In Larger Freedom', that positions human security as encompassing “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want”.

These normative changes ushered in three decades of democratisation in Africa, albeit of varied quality. As military coups, disregard for presidential term limits, and fraudulent electoral practices erode some of these gains, recommitting to human security has become an urgent priority. It is the only way to put the continent’s development back on track.

Adekeye Adebajo, a professor and a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, served on UN missions in South Africa, Western Sahara, and Iraq. He is the author of The Splendid Tapestry of African Life: Essays on a Resilient Continent, its Diaspora, and the World (Routledge, 2025) and Global Africa: Profiles in Courage, Creativity, and Cruelty (Routledge, 2024). He is also the editor of The Black Atlantic’s Triple Burden: Slavery, Colonialism, and Reparations (Manchester University Press, 2025).

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.
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