Strategic Competition and the Emergence of Maximalism in Africa

Strategic competition has handed African political actors, state and non-state alike, an expanding array of international patrons to choose from. This has made them less inclined toward concession and more disposed toward maximalist positions in pursuit of their strategic ends. The intensification of competition within this space of interest is compounding that posture, with each new entrant raising the stakes for those already invested.

The international backdrop has long exerted a fluctuating pull on African foreign policy, tightening and loosening the room available to state and non-state actors alike. In the post-colonial, Cold War era, African states and the insurgencies contesting their legitimacy oriented themselves around a rigid ideological dichotomy. Leftist movements stood against Western-backed governments, and anti-communist rebels took aim at Soviet-aligned establishments. This bipolarity fuelled conflict from the Horn of Africa to the Sahel to the Great Lakes, but it also imposed a structural constraint on how much leverage any single actor could accumulate. With only two patrons available, alignment-shopping had limits. The collapse of the Soviet Union removed one pole entirely, and the unipolar moment that followed sharpened the landscape further, with a Western-led order setting the terms of African foreign policy engagement.

Far more disordered than the bipolar order it replaced, the current landscape – defined by many as bipolar – has produced a genuinely new set of circumstances for African political actors. Gulf monarchies, Russia, China, an increasingly transactional West, and a growing set of regional middle powers now compete for access and influence across the continent. Where bipolarity offered two options, multipolarity offers many, and African actors, state and non-state, have positioned themselves to exploit this expanded field of patrons. The practical effect is diminished incentive to compromise; an actor unwilling to concede to one partner can typically secure backing from another.

Across the increasingly anarchic terrain of the Sahel, natural resources turned a security crisis into a contest over extraction and influence. Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, all under military juntas fighting cross-border jihadist insurgencies and secessionist groups, scrapped their long-standing security agreements with France and turned to Russia, which offered, in the leaderships' own rationale, more favourable terms. The substitution gave the juntas access to weapons technology and direct military support, allowing them to pursue autonomous military goals and radically reorient their regional postures. France's exit has in turn opened room for other actors, alongside Russia, to deepen their own security engagement in the region and diversifying the foreign involvement further.

At the eastern edge of the Sahel belt, strategic competition within a civil war has made the prospect of settlement increasingly illusory. After the ousting of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, Sudan became consumed by a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, with fighting now in its fourth year. Both belligerents have sustained their campaigns through external backers pursuing their own resource and influence interests in the country. Neither SAF nor RSF has strong incentive to accept a negotiated settlement while external patrons keep the war financed, and the contest over Sudan's trajectory continues to intensify as neither side shows willingness to concede ground.

Within the Great Lakes, strategic competition is less visible but increasingly consequential, as the region's critical resources become a growing source of contest between external powers. Washington, in its bid to build supply chains and to counter China's dominant position in the extraction of critical minerals, moved to broker a minerals-for-peace deal between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As part of the "America First" foreign policy agenda, the deal signalled a shift in U.S. Africa policy from liberal internationalism toward an overarching transactionalism. Washington, however, may have established a fragile peace, and whether the intensification of interest compounds competition and conflict in the long run remains to be seen.

The United States' new "trade not aid" approach to the continent is in part a response to the dilemma now facing Western states, caught between upholding old principles that condition engagement on governance and adopting the transactional posture increasingly favoured by their competitors. Africa has seen a parallel shift from the United Kingdom, whose recalibrated strategy has moved toward transactionalism, and from France, which has reoriented toward the east to regain continental influence, most visibly in its engagements with states like Kenya. Whether the West fully converges on the transactional model remains to be seen. A more pragmatic Western approach, less insistent on conditions of democracy and governance, would deepen the current volatility rather than resolve it.