About the APS
The African Public Square (APS) is a creation of the African Leadership Centre (ALC), Nairobi, as a platform for open debate and discussion on topical pressing issues of peace, security and development in Africa. The APS aims to speak back to global powers to advance the continent’s peace, security and development agenda. The APS will harness Africa’s intellectual power through intergenerational conversation, rethinking Africa’s response to its marginalization on the global stage in a continental space.
The African Leadership Centre (ALC) launched the African Public Square (APS) in June 2024 as a platform to harness Africa’s intellectual power and inter-generational agency to enable a rethinking of the continent’s response to its marginalisation on the global stage.
The APS aims to:
- Speak back to established agendas in the global landscape that place Africa at a disadvantage.
- Offer new solutions and proposals for re-energising Africa’s normative and response framework, with possibilities for Africa’s renewal.
- Expand the constituency of actors that speak for Africa when the spaces for engaging state and continental action are closed.
Towards these ends, the APS offers a three-part intervention to raise Africa’s position in the world:
- A convening platform: to convene new and established voices constituting an intergenerational community of African public intellectuals catalysing the repositioning of Africa in the global order.
- An annual high-level forum – an African/global public debate bringing together prominent African intellectuals along with a variety of interlocutors to frame and propose an alternative framework of engagement on issues of the day shaping Africa’s trajectory.
- An inter-generational community of African public intellectuals in co-leadership of special interventions that propose new ideas and forms of collaboration for responding to Africa’s challenges, and reshaping global engagement to raise Africa’s position in the world.
In its first high-level forum, the APS convened, along with key partners, an initial intergenerational group of African public intellectuals to open a public debate on two critical question: Can Africa escape the twin tragedy of deinstitutionalisation through “militiafication” and externally imposed templates? How can African societies recreate peaceful states that serve the collective and not the few? The open debate addressed these questions in the context of Sudan and South Sudan.