The Peace and Security System has Three Functions. African States Need a Fourth

The multilateral peace and security system performs three functions reliably. It coerces – through sanctions and military pressure. It constrains – by freezing assets and restricting the means of violence. It signals – through resolutions and norms.

There is a fourth thing it was never designed to do. And it is the function African states most need.

Call it build: the construction of political authority, institutional capacity and legitimate governance in the spaces where international tools operate. Concretely: rebuilding the courts, public administration and revenue systems communities depend on, and the legitimate local authority armed actors to take over when those break down. The formulation comes from a 2021 proposal your author drafted while serving as Coordinator of the UN Panel of Experts on Somalia. It was consulted across Security Council capitals, drawing support from the P3 and interest from Moscow and Beijing.

It has not moved. The concept generalises beyond sanctions, with limits: not every multilateral tool is the right instrument to build with. But the diagnosis is general. Without a build-function, the other three produce a destructive equilibrium. They degrade the capacity of armed and criminal actors without replacing the governance functions those actors were performing. Communities are left more exposed after the intervention than before.

This is not a marginal observation about peacekeeping methodology. It is why the multilateral system is failing on the continent that bears the heaviest burden of armed violence – and why it will continue to fail until the operational gap at its core is named and closed.

Replacement of Function

Consider what is actually being countered. An armed group that governs territory in the Sahel, taxes commerce in eastern Congo, or – like Al-Shabaab through its parallel court system in Somalia – adjudicates land disputes and so determines who owns property across generations, is not simply a security threat. It is a political actor performing the functions of a state in spaces where the state is absent, predatory, or has lost legitimacy. The international response – designation, sanctions, kinetic pressure, security partnerships – addresses the symptom while leaving the relational and governance breakdown that produced it intact. Capacity is degraded. Vacuums widen. New actors fill them.

Even the three functions the system does perform have always worked unevenly. Coerce, constrain and signal bite hardest against weaker actors and deflect off the powerful. A sanctions regime can degrade a Sahelian armed group's revenue. It cannot meaningfully constrain a major-power patron, a permanent member of the Security Council, or a sovereign supplier of the financial and military inputs that allow a conflict to continue. The architecture's instruments are calibrated to the actors it can reach, not the actors whose behaviour most shapes the environment in which armed groups, illicit networks, and political crises emerge. This is not a recent failing. It is structural – encoded in a system whose veto architecture was set when only four African states were independent, and whose post-Cold War expansion took place under unusual power concentration with limited systemic challenge.

The same asymmetry runs through outcomes. By the metric Western states use to assess two decades of post-9/11 counter-terrorism – intercepted overseas attacks – the architecture is broadly counted a success. By the metric the most impacted states would use – whether their populations are more secure – it has been a failure. Communities in the Sahel, Somalia and the Levant are more fragilised than they were, despite vast foreign investment, and governments are openly questioning their partners. Both judgments are accurate. The architecture's success metric was set by who built it.

The deeper diagnosis is this: the multilateral peace and security system is strong at the normative layer and weak at the operational. It is good at codifying, declaring, listing and signalling. It is bad at implementation – at building anything that requires sustained construction in contested political terrain. Build is the most acute expression of this gap, but it is not the only one. The same pattern shows up wherever a resolution exists and a delivery mechanism does not, wherever a mandate is renewed and the capability behind it is hollowed, wherever a norm is articulated and the enforcement architecture is conspicuously absent against actors with the leverage to ignore it.

Anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism financing is the cleanest illustration. The UN has co-led the development of a substantial global standards regime – a genuine normative achievement that has driven real implementation across global financial centres. In the most impacted states, where formal financial sectors are recent, were shaped by conflict and overlap with the telecommunications providers central to a country's future, retrofitted compliance has alienated the actors needed to make any of it work. The standard exists. The operational fit does not.

This is not a claim that the architecture has no operational record. There are real successes – Liberia, Sierra Leone, aspects of the Mozambique transition. But the cases where the system has helped build durable order have generally turned on local conditions, leadership and timing aligning despite the architecture rather than through it. Institutionally, the system remains calibrated for pressure, not reconstruction.

Transactional Politics

This gap was tolerable – just barely – while the system's principal guarantor underwrote the order it had built. That assumption is no longer safe. The primary architect and historical guarantor of the post-war multilateral order has itself shifted toward transactional and coercive engagement, treating its own commitments as contingent on bilateral advantage. The cost of that shift falls hardest on states that structured their engagement on the assumption that the rules-based order was underwritten – and on the populations who bear the consequences when sanctions, mandates and missions are deployed in volume, but their operational companion never arrives.

The build-function asks a different question than coerce, constrain and signal ask. Not what is the threat and how is it countered, but what relationships are broken, what conditions produced the rupture, and what would it take to restore the political and social fabric. It treats the construction of legitimate authority – by communities, with institutions they recognise, in forms they help shape – as an instrument of security rather than a deliverable to be picked up later by another actor with a smaller budget and a shorter mandate.

This is closer to the relational logic that runs through much of African political philosophy than to the dominant Westphalian-liberal frame. Conflict, in that tradition, is not simply an event between parties with competing interests but a rupture of relationships that durable order requires restoring. One does not need to adopt the tradition wholesale to recognise what it identifies clearly: an order built only by degrading bad actors, without restoring the local authorities and relationships that hold communities together, will not hold.

The build-function also forces an honest accounting of which actors must be at the table. It is here that the demographic reality of the continent enters as more than a footnote. Africa's median age is approximately 19. Nearly 60% of its population is under 25. By 2050, roughly 40% of the world's young people will be African. A response oriented toward institutional structures that have lost legitimacy with the under-25 majority is not viable, however technically sound it appears. Build asks who needs to be part of this and whose buy-in determines whether it holds – questions the conventional peace architecture has been remarkably consistent in not asking.

What this looks like in practice is more visible than people pretend. Mediation paired with municipal governance restoration, rather than mediation followed by elections. Sanctions monitoring teams mandated to identify the build-conditions a community needs once a designated actor is degraded, not only to track the actor itself – and given multi-year reporting cycles instead of annual renewals that actively inhibit strategic thinking. AU-led operational mechanisms running alongside Council resolutions rather than waiting on them. Justice-system reconstruction integrated with security-sector reform rather than sequenced behind it. None of this is conceptually radical. It has been documented, piloted and in some cases delivered. What has been missing is the architectural decision to treat it as core peace and security work rather than something funded after the operational machinery has failed.

Completing the Circle

None of this is an argument for abandoning sanctions, mandates, or the institutional machinery that has been built. It is an argument for finishing the job – and for being honest about which parts of it have always been unfinished. A system that can coerce, constrain and signal but cannot build, and that does even those three things only against the actors it can reach, is not a peace and security system. It is a normative apparatus that produces predictable operational failures and then funds the humanitarian response to them.

The choice is not whether to defend the existing architecture as it stands. The architect has stepped back from that defence. The choice is whether the next iteration of the multilateral system closes the operational gap that has always been there – and whether African states, which have more institutional weight in the system than they have consistently chosen to exercise, lead the redesign. The numbers in the Security Council, the African Union, sub-regional bodies and the international financial architecture are more favourable than outcomes suggest. What has been missing is not leverage but its deliberate, coordinated use.

The states that bear the costs of this architecture already know it was not built for their security. What remains uncertain is whether it can change. The build proposal has sat since 2021. Either the system demonstrates that capacity now, or the states it was meant to serve build past it.

© RUSI, 2026.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author's, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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