Sovereignty Against Spillover: The AU Summit's Good-Neighbourliness Bid and the DRC–Rwanda Test of a Contradictory Doctrine

This ASA Situation Report™ is a detailed assessment of the 23 September summit-level PSC session on good neighbourliness and regional security responses, convened in New York on the margins of the 81st UN General Assembly. It examines the sovereignty-spillover contradiction in AU security doctrine, the DRC-Rwanda crisis as the session's central test, the terrorism and cross-regional dimensions, and the root-cause agenda of governance, unconstitutional change and illicit economies.

Executive Summary

The month's only summit-level session convenes on 23 September in New York, on the margins of the 81st UN General Assembly, under the theme 'Good Neighbourliness and Regional Responses to Security and Terrorism Challenges in Africa.' It gathers heads of state and high representatives, including Burundian President Évariste Ndayishimiye as Chairperson of the AU Assembly, to evaluate the AU's management of inter-state relations and regional security cooperation across the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin, the Horn and the Great Lakes — and, explicitly, to address de-escalation of inter-state tensions including those between the DRC and Rwanda, alongside the root causes of insecurity: weak governance, unconstitutional changes of government, and the illicit economies of arms, mining and trafficking.

The theme is abstract; the subtext is not. 'Good neighbourliness' at summit level, with the DRC-Rwanda tension named directly, is the diplomatic frame within which the continent's most dangerous inter-state fault line will be discussed at the highest level the AU convenes. Beneath the theme sits an unresolved contradiction at the heart of AU security doctrine: the Union's founding sovereignty and non-interference norms are poorly matched to security problems that are cross-border by nature. That contradiction — sovereignty against spillover — is the session's real intellectual and political stake.

ASA's central judgment is that this is a summit about a principle that the continent's hardest case is actively violating, and that its utility depends on whether it can move beyond principle to leverage. A summit that reaffirms good neighbourliness in the abstract will produce a communiqué; a summit that uses its authority to press the fragmented DRC-Rwanda mediation toward convergence, and to name cross-border support to armed groups as a breach of the principle, would be genuinely consequential.

1. The Sovereignty-Spillover Contradiction

The session sits on a foundational tension in AU doctrine. The Union's Constitutive Act privileges sovereignty, territorial integrity and non-interference in the internal affairs of member states; its Article 4(h) right of intervention in grave circumstances — war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity — is the narrow and rarely-invoked exception that proves the sovereigntist rule. Yet the security threats the summit addresses are constitutively cross-border. Terrorism in the Sahel and Lake Chad ignores frontiers and exploits the ungoverned spaces between states. The illicit economies of arms, minerals and trafficking are trans-boundary by design, their profitability deriving precisely from crossing borders. And the DRC-Rwanda crisis is, at its core, a dispute about cross-border action — the presence of foreign forces and the support of armed groups across an international boundary. 'Good neighbourliness' as a principle affirms the inviolability of borders; effective security response requires acting across them. The AU must hold both, and the tension is operational, not merely rhetorical.

ASA Assessment — ASA assesses this contradiction as the deepest structural obstacle to AU security effectiveness, and the good-neighbourliness session as an implicit acknowledgement of it. The continental architecture was built for inter-state relations among sovereign equals; its gravest current threats are trans-national flows and cross-border interventions the inter-state frame handles poorly. Until the AU develops doctrine and instruments for legitimate, accountable cross-border security cooperation — distinct from both passive non-interference and unilateral intervention — summits like this one will affirm principles that the threats routinely overrun.

2. The DRC–Rwanda File at Summit Level

The explicit naming of the DRC-Rwanda tension signals that the session's practical centre of gravity is the Great Lakes crisis — the continent's most dangerous active inter-state confrontation. The summit intersects a live and fragile diplomatic landscape: the US-brokered Washington Accords between Kinshasa and Kigali, the Qatar-led Doha process between the DRC government and the M23, and wider mediation, an architecture that is extensive but unintegrated and, as ASA has assessed in dedicated reporting, outpaced by events on the ground. A summit-level PSC pronouncement enters this crowded field with both opportunity and risk.

The opportunity is to lend African, head-of-state weight to de-escalation and to reinforce, from the continent's highest security body, the principle that cross-border support to armed groups is incompatible with good neighbourliness. The risk is twofold: redundancy — adding another forum to an already fragmented mediation landscape whose central problem is fragmentation itself — and friction, if the summit's public framing causes either party to feel arraigned before its peers and to harden its position accordingly. The presence of the AU Assembly Chairperson raises both the stakes and the visibility. The good-neighbourliness framing is a deliberate diplomatic softening: it allows the crisis to be addressed as a general principle rather than a specific indictment, which lowers the temperature but also limits how far the session can go toward the concrete pressure the crisis requires.

ASA Assessment — ASA assesses that the summit's most useful contribution to the DRC-Rwanda file would be integrative rather than additive: not a new mediation track but a reinforcement of African ownership and a push toward convergence of the existing tracks, whose fragmentation the parties currently exploit. A summit that reaffirms good neighbourliness in the abstract adds little to an already crowded field; a summit that uses its authority to press the Washington, Doha and wider processes toward a single coherent strategy — and to state plainly that cross-border support to armed groups breaches the principle it convenes to uphold — would add real and distinctively African weight.

3. The Terrorism and Cross-Regional Dimension

Beyond the DRC-Rwanda file, the session addresses the expanding operational reach of terrorist and violent-extremist groups across four regions — the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin, the Horn and the Great Lakes — and the enhancement of synergies between the AU, the RECs and Regional Mechanisms, and international partners. This is a substantial and worsening problem: jihadist groups in the Sahel have expanded southward toward the coastal states; the Lake Chad factions persist; al-Shabaab endures in the Horn; and the regional counter-terrorism architecture has been strained by the fragmentation of the Sahelian security order, including the departure of the Alliance of Sahel States from ECOWAS and the associated disruption of regional cooperation. Good neighbourliness has a direct counter-terrorism application: terrorist groups thrive precisely in the seams between states that do not cooperate, and border cooperation, intelligence-sharing and joint operations are the practical content of good neighbourliness against a trans-national threat.

ASA Assessment — ASA assesses that the counter-terrorism dimension is where good neighbourliness has the most concrete and least contested application: terrorist groups exploit the gaps between non-cooperating states, and closing those gaps is a shared interest that does not implicate the sovereignty sensitivities the DRC-Rwanda file raises. The obstacle is the fragmentation of the regional security order, particularly in the Sahel; a summit that advanced practical border and intelligence cooperation across the AES–ECOWAS divide would address the terrorism threat where it is most tractable.

4. Root Causes: Governance, Unconstitutional Change and Illicit Economies

The session's attention to root causes — weak governance, unconstitutional changes of government (UCG), and the illicit economies of arms, mining and trafficking — is analytically correct and connects the summit to the AU's wider preoccupations, including the wave of coups across the Sahel and the constitutional-order questions they raise. These are the structural conditions in which terrorism and armed-group economies flourish and addressing them is ultimately more consequential than any counter-terrorism operation. But they are also the hardest for the AU to act on. UCG has repeatedly divided the Union between the principle of constitutional order and the pragmatism of engaging the governments that coups produce, exposing the gap between the AU's anti-coup norms and its capacity or will to enforce them. And the illicit economies implicate elites and networks that reach into member states themselves — the mining revenues, arms flows and trafficking corridors that finance armed groups run through, and are sometimes protected by, state actors, which makes collective AU action against them politically fraught.

ASA Assessment — ASA assesses the root-cause framing as correct diagnosis and hard prescription. The illicit economies that sustain armed groups are the structural engine of much African conflict, but acting against them confronts the interests of the AU's own membership, and the UCG question repeatedly divides the Union. A summit that moved from naming these economies to a concrete mechanism against them — traceability, sanction, cross-border financial cooperation — would break genuinely new ground; ASA's baseline is that the summit will name rather than act, because acting implicates the member states convening it.

5. The Summit Format: Authority and Risk

Convening at head-of-state level, in New York, during UNGA week, gives the session an authority and visibility an ordinary ambassadorial meeting lacks — and creates both an opportunity and a risk on the continent's most sensitive files. The authority could lend genuine weight to de-escalation and to the enforcement of continental principles. The visibility could equally harden positions if parties feel publicly arraigned, and the UNGA-margins setting means the session competes for principals' attention with a crowded diplomatic calendar. The format is a double-edged instrument: its weight can advance the agenda or, mishandled, inflame the very tensions it convenes to de-escalate.

ASA Assessment — ASA assesses the summit format as an asset whose value depends entirely on whether its authority is used or merely displayed. A summit that leverages head-of-state weight toward concrete outcomes — mediation convergence, counter-terrorism cooperation, a mechanism against illicit economies — justifies its level; a summit that produces a high-visibility reaffirmation of principles already held expends the format's scarce authority on symbolism.

ASA Final Assessment

The 23 September summit is the September programme's highest-profile session and its most structurally revealing. Convened at head-of-state level in New York, it addresses good neighbourliness — a principle — as the frame for the continent's most dangerous inter-state crisis and its most intractable trans-national threats. The session's central difficulty is that the AU's sovereignty-based order is poorly matched to security problems that are cross-border by nature, and that the good-neighbourliness principle, while sound, affirms the very borders that terrorism, illicit economies and the DRC-Rwanda crisis routinely cross. ASA assesses that the summit's value will lie in whether it moves from principle to leverage: on the DRC-Rwanda file, toward integrating rather than multiplying the mediation tracks and naming cross-border support to armed groups as a breach of good neighbourliness; on counter-terrorism, toward practical border and intelligence cooperation across the fragmented regional order; and on root causes, toward concrete mechanisms against the illicit economies that finance conflict. Its baseline outcome is a strong communiqué reaffirming principles the continent already holds. Its potential, if the summit's authority is used rather than merely displayed, is to begin reconciling the sovereignty norm with the cross-border reality on which African security effectiveness ultimately turns — the deepest and most consequential question the September programme raises.