Ministerial Session on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism: Policy Coherence in a Deteriorating Threat Environment

The PSC's 21 July ministerial-level session on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism in Africa convenes at a moment when the continental terrorist threat has reached its most operationally advanced and geographically extensive state since the emergence of Sahelian jihadism in the early 2010s. The session builds on a multi-year sequence of PSC engagements with the counter-terrorism theme — the 1111th session of October 2022 that expanded the response toolkit to include dialogue, negotiation, and voluntary disengagement; the 1266th session of March 2025 on deradicalisation — and is expected to review recent developments and trends while advancing policy action on the specifics of how terrorism and violent extremism manifest across different parts of the continent.

The threat environment the ministerial session must engage is substantially more dangerous than the environment that framed the Council's previous counter-terrorism sessions.

In West Africa and the Sahel, JNIM has demonstrated capacity for simultaneous multi-city coordinated operations, has assassinated a serving defence minister, and is executing a systematic siege strategy targeting Bamako's supply chains. The geographic expansion of jihadist operations toward coastal state borderlands — documented attacks in northern Benin, Togo, and Côte d'Ivoire — confirms that the threat is no longer contained within the Sahel interior. The Africa Corps model that was deployed as the primary external security response to Sahelian jihadism has faced its most significant operational challenge and credibility question in the April 2026 events and the withdrawal from Kidal.

In the Lake Chad Basin, Boko Haram and ISWAP continue to threaten civilian populations across northeastern Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon despite sustained military pressure. The killing of ISIL's globally second-ranked commander in May 2026 represents a significant tactical achievement that does not alter the structural mobilisation conditions sustaining recruitment.

In eastern Africa, Al-Shabaab continues to conduct operations in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda — the current PSC Chair — with a campaign reach and operational sophistication that the ATMIS transition has not definitively disrupted.

In central Africa, the LRA's residual presence in the DRC-CAR-South Sudan tri-border zone and the proliferation of armed groups with ideological and criminal hybrid characteristics continue to create protection threats for civilian populations across multiple jurisdictions.

The PSC's previous counter-terrorism sessions have produced important conceptual advances that the July ministerial session should build on rather than restart. The 1111th session's recognition of dialogue and negotiation as legitimate instruments in the counter-terrorism response toolkit — alongside military operations, sanctions, and deradicalisation programming — represented a genuine intellectual advance that acknowledged the limits of purely military approaches. The 1266th session's call for incorporating deradicalisation into the AU action plan responded to the documented reality that military suppression without rehabilitation and reintegration pathways produces tactical disruption without strategic resolution.

The key questions the July ministerial session must advance — rather than simply reaffirm — are the following.

What is the current status of the AU action plan on prevention and fight against terrorism and violent extremism, and has the deradicalisation component requested in the 1266th session been incorporated? A ministerial session that calls for action plan updates without establishing a monitoring mechanism for those updates reproduces the implementation gap that has characterised previous sessions.

How does the PSC assess the Africa Corps model's counter-terrorism effectiveness following the April 2026 events in Mali? The ministerial session provides an opportunity for a frank and evidence-based assessment of alternative security partnership models and their results — an assessment whose conclusions will shape AU member states' future security architecture choices in ways that affect the terrorist threat environment.

What is the AU's position on the drone warfare dimension of terrorism in the Sahel and Sudan? The use of drones by both state and non-state actors — including jihadist groups acquiring drone capabilities — represents a technological evolution in the threat that the AU's existing counter-terrorism framework has not yet addressed with specific policy instruments.

What is the status of the compendium of African national reconciliation best practices requested at the 1111th session? The development and dissemination of reconciliation best practices was identified in 2022 as a priority for the AU Commission. A ministerial session in 2026 should receive a progress report and, if the compendium has not been completed, establish a specific timeline and accountability mechanism for its finalisation.

The 27 July update on political transitions in Burkina Faso and Niger — the third Council consideration of AES states' transition situations as a combined agenda item — will provide a specific test of the ministerial session's policy coherence. If the ministerial session adopts counter-terrorism commitments that require cooperation with Burkina Faso and Niger, and the 27 July session reaffirms the Council's concerns about their transition trajectories, the two sessions create a policy tension that the Council must address coherently: the AU's counter-terrorism agenda requires engagement with AES states whose governance trajectories the AU has formally declared concern about, and whose expulsion from ECOWAS and rejection of democratic transition frameworks have reduced the multilateral levers available for influencing their security choices.

ASA's assessment is that the July ministerial session's value will be determined by its capacity to produce time-bound, accountable, and operationally specific commitments rather than thematic reaffirmations. The deteriorating threat environment leaves insufficient institutional time for another cycle of framework endorsement without implementation follow-through.