Beyond firefighting: How Africa can break the cycle of violence

For decades, Africa has invested heavily in peace and security. National governments have built armies, police services, and judicial institutions. African regional organisations have developed elaborate conflict management mechanisms. The African Union has established one of the world’s most ambitious peace and security architectures. International partners have spent billions of dollars supporting peace missions, and state-building initiatives.

Yet, despite these enormous investments, the guns continue to fire. This presents one of the greatest puzzles of our generation. Why does violence remain so persistent despite decades of effort to eliminate it?

The usual explanations are by now familiar. We are told to look to the enduring scars of colonialism, the continent’s border governance deficit, weak and fragile states, poor leadership, external interference, competition over natural resources, ethnic divisions, corruption, economic mismanagement, and persistent poverty. The list is long, and not entirely wrong.

However, another critical piece of the puzzle deserves greater attention. Africa’s violence problem is fundamentally a sustainable governance challenge. Africa governance systems are designed to respond and manage crises. They are not endowed with the capacity to prevent crisis. Indeed, Africa governance systems have become trapped in a cycle of firefighting.

The human cost is staggering. Figures published in June 2026 by the UNHCR, and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre paint a sobering picture. Conflict and violence have forced tens of millions of Africans from their homes, with the continent accounting for nearly half of the world’s almost 118 million forcibly displaced people. Behind these statistics lies a profound human tragedy: millions of families uprooted, communities shattered, and generations denied the opportunity to build a better future. War is not merely a security challenge, it is one of the greatest obstacles to prosperity, dignity, and human development.  Across Africa, wars do not simply claim lives, they steal futures.

But focusing only on war risks missing a larger reality. Physical violence is often not the starting point of conflict but rather the final and most visible manifestation of deep-rooted structural and symbolic violence that has accumulated over time. Structural violence manifests through exclusionary political, economic and social systems, inequalities, marginalisation, and uneven access to resources and opportunities, while symbolic violence normalises domination, exclusion, and the devaluation of certain individuals, communities and identities.

Ending Africa’s cycle of violence therefore requires much more than ending wars. It requires uprooting structural and symbolic violence or what academics call building positive peace.

Building positive peace requires sustainable governance where policy makers consciously create resilient system of collective decision-making arrangements designed to produce equitable, inclusive, and durable outcomes across generations. For sustainable governance to work, you need governance institutions to be durable, resilient, equity-oriented, inclusive, and tailored to meet the needs of future generations. Too often, governance institutions are judged by their ability to solve today’s crisis. Rarely are African governance institutions judged by their ability to prevent tomorrow’s problems. Africa needs to move beyond this firefighting approach to sustainable governance. Viewing governance in sustainable terms means treating it as more than the responsibility of the state alone. It requires understanding governance as an ecosystem of five interconnected gears, each performing a distinct function yet dependent on the others. Like the gears in a machine, if one falters, the entire system suffers. If they work together, they generate the resilience, legitimacy, and collective capacity needed to secure lasting peace and shared prosperity.

The first gear is the local level, where sustainable governance begins. This requires that African indigenous institutions like traditional councils, local governments such as district Assemblies, faith communities like churches, credible community organisations such as NGOs, and civil society groups to work together to build legitimacy, foster trust, and give people a genuine stake in their own futures. The second gear is the state. African states remain indispensable: they provide security, deliver public goods and services, build infrastructure, regulate markets, and drive development. But states cannot, and should not, do everything alone. They must have clearly defined role in the governance architecture. The state gear must focus on genuine national priorities. The third gear is the regional level, where neighbouring countries work together to confront challenges that transcend national borders. Challenges like migration, terrorism, cross border trade and illicit financial flows demands a regional approach to tackle them effectively. The fourth gear is the continent itself. Here, the African Union must have both the freedom and the capacity to look beyond the next crisis to craft a long-term vision, forge common norms, build shared ambitions, and uphold collective African decisions. No African country, however powerful, can secure Africa’s future alone. The continent needs an AU capable of turning national aspirations into a common African project. The fifth gear is the global stage. Africa is not an island. Its fortunes are increasingly bound to those of the wider world, and the defining challenges of our age, ranging from nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, pandemics, financial shocks to other planetary challenges like the weaponisation of outer space cannot be managed by any state or continent acting alone. They demand international cooperation and collective action. Like the gears of a well-built machine, each stage of governance performs a distinct function, but only when they work together can they generate the peace, resilience, and broad-based prosperity that Africa needs, its people want and deserve.

The challenge is not the absence of these governance structures but their failure to function as gears. Too often they compete rather than reinforce one another. African states seek to dominate local governance institutions. Regional organizations duplicate state functions. Continental institutions attempt to do everything. Global institutions sometimes bypass African institutions altogether. What is even worse, our existing governance institutions remain trapped in crisis management instead of prevention mode. To break this cycle, governance must become more integrated, prioritise positive peace, place equity and inclusion at its core, and create institutions capable of thinking beyond immediate political pressures to safeguard the interests of future generations.

Breaking Africa’s cycle of violence will not be easy. There are no quick fixes and no silver bullets. But if the post-independence era has taught Africa anything, it is that the continent’s future cannot be secured by winning battles alone. It cannot be built by lurching from one crisis to the next or by perpetually extinguishing the fires of conflict. A strategy of endless firefighting may prevent the house from burning down today, but it does little to stop the next blaze. Lasting peace will come not from managing crises, but from building an ecosystem of sustainable institutions that prevent crisis from erupting in the first place.

This means creating institutions that operate like gears at the local, national, regional, continental, and global stages. Building governance institutions that can anticipate risks, crises, widen opportunity, give people a stake in society, turn diversity into a source of strength and institutions capable of building a just, inclusive, and positive peace. Africa needs not more institutions but smart ones.  

The twentieth century was Africa’s struggle for political independence. The twenty-first century has largely been Africa’s struggle for peace and security. The great task of the remainder of this century should be to build sustainable governance systems capable of transforming conflict arenas into positive peace zones. That is how Africa can finally break the cycle of violence.

By Professor Thomas Kwasi Tieku

The writer is currently a Carnegie-Diasporan Scholar at the University of Ghana, an Associate Research Fellow at the United Nations University and Professor of Politics at King’s University in Canada.

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