African actors play vital roles in strengthening the resiliency of the international security architecture.
Maritime traffic and trade face severe disruptions as efforts to restrict access to key waterways, such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al Mandab Strait, intensify. This is exacerbated by the resurgence of piracy in the Gulf of Aden. These constrictions to maritime traffic have increased global fuel and fertilizer prices by roughly 30 percent. This is causing global economic strain, food insecurity, job losses, and risks of political unrest.
Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing by foreign commercial trawlers globally continues to exploit valuable natural resources worth an estimated $12 billion in annual revenues.
Transnational organized criminal networks—trafficking narcotics, pharmaceuticals, and people—continue to grow more sophisticated and destabilizing.
Given its strategic location connecting continents and waterways, Africa is at the crossroads of many of these transnational threats. While often a target of these forces of global instability, African actors also play vital roles in strengthening the resiliency of the international security architecture.
In response to repeated closures of the Strait of Hormuz, African oil producers, which represent roughly 10 percent of global output, have increased their exports and supply outputs to international buyers. Nigeria and Angola have led this effort.
The recently operationalized Dangote oil refinery in Lagos, Nigeria, the world’s largest, has helped reduce global supply constraints. The refinery has become one of the world’s largest exporters of jet fuel, including shipments to Europe and the United States.
Outputs from the Dangote refinery have also boosted the production and export of urea—a widely used fertilizer—reducing the strain on fertilizer markets also sharply impacted by the shutdown of oil exports from the Persian Gulf.
The African Export-Import Bank (AfreximBank), Africa’s main multilateral trade-finance lender, rolled out a $10-billion emergency fund for African countries to pay for fuel, fertilizer, and medicines to further ease budgetary pressures.
The Dangote Group has meanwhile concluded talks with Kenya and Uganda to build a $16 billion oil refinery in Lamu, Kenya, to supply refined fuel across the East African Community. The new investments in refining capacity mark a strategic step toward a more integrated and resilient African hydrocarbon market, which would reduce vulnerability to shocks from Middle Eastern fuel supply disruptions.
With militant Islamist insurgencies concentrated in the Sahel, Somalia, and the Lake Chad Basin, Africa is a focal point of the global terrorist threat with nearly 24,000 annual fatalities linked to these groups.
African forces have been instrumental in pushing back against attempts by global terrorist networks, such as the Islamic State and al Qaeda, to establish coordination and financing hubs on the continent. In 2025, Puntland authorities mobilized 3,000 security forces as part of Operation Hilaac (meaning lightning) to dislodge the Islamic State from a base it had established in the al Miskaad mountains in the Bari region of northern Somalia. Supported by air strikes from international partners, including the United States and the United Arab Emirates, the Puntland forces led the ground offensive in the rugged terrain to cut off supply lines and flush out the militants from their cave complexes.
Sustained military actions from Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya have also been vital in preventing the Islamic State from gaining a stronghold in North Africa after the terrorist group was defeated in Iraq and Syria in the late 2010s. From roughly 3,700 annual deaths linked to the Islamic State and affiliated groups in North Africa in 2015 and 2016, sustained pressure has reduced the fatality count to double digits in recent years.
A Guest Editorial