THE AFRICAN PUBLIC SQUARE (APS)
Second Global Edition
at Africa Week 2026
OPENING EVENT: African Public Square (Global Edition 2026)
A new urgency confronts Africa in a global environment underlined by shifting alliances,multipolarity and disorder, which this provides Africa with an opportunity to reinventitself and help redefine the new landscape. In the last three years, King’s Africa Week has explored on the “what” and “why” of African agency. This year’s King’s Africa Week titled:
Resourcing African Agency: Priorities, Innovation and Preparedness in Multipolar
World examines the “how” of that agency.
King’s Africa Week Concept Note underscores the need for a focus on resourcing African agency in the current global context given the following:
• The challenge to multilateralism through attacks and the undermining of
international institutional infrastructure, including the United Nations (UN).
• Widespread funding cuts towards development and humanitarian assistance from Global North economies and instabilities in global trade relations, underpinned by a US trade war with economies in Africa, Europe, Latin America, Asia and especially China.
• Persistent structural inequities in global finance and debt regimes that exhibit
biases against African contexts.
• Decimation of collective continental and regional institutional architectures
addressing peace, security, development and governance priorities, evidenced by
the responses to the war in Sudan and the re-emergence of military rule in West
Africa.
Against this background, King’s Africa Week 2026 asks, what resources—material,
human, institutional and ideational—are necessary for actualising African agency?
In this regard, the disordered world that is upon us, though not costless, is a great
opportunity to alter Africa’s fortunes and actively shape a different world order. African Public Square – the opening event of King’s Africa Week on 2nd March 2026 – interrogates how Africa can seize this moment of global disorder, whose import and gravity appears not to have reached high levels of awareness on the continent. Indeed, a critical dimension of African agency is awareness of the consequences of shifting global alliances for the continent.
For Africa to seize this moment of opportunity, several factors must be present including:
• A strategic debate in Africa with a focus on how to pivot before the dramatic
reshuffling of global (dis)order takes shape. This will create coherence and
unanimity on the strategic options with a focus on the critical importance of
intentional and directed actions to renew sustained energised agency.
• Building new alliances for unique and trusted relationships with unlikely partners in the Global North to navigate the geopolitical chaos and reinvent itself as a relevant presence in the global stage. The geopolitical contestation is producing a South in the global North which is facing similar challenges from the emerging rapture as new realignment potentially becomes a mutual strategic necessity. This might refocus potential African allies away from an exploitative to a collaborative
approach, thus partnering with a shared purpose.
• Providing leadership for both the strategic debate and the building of alliances,
which will require among other things, a strong continental leadership space with a multi-layered and multi-actor coalition. This will also help create political
deterrence and enable the continent face emerging challenges with steadiness
and resolve.
APS SECOND GLOBAL EDITION DURING THE AFRICA WEEK 2026
The Second Global African Public Square will be held during the Africa Week 2nd October in London, United Kingdom. Co-hosted by the African Leadership Centre, High Commission of Zambia and Thabo Mbeki Foundation in collaboration with SABC. This edition of the APS open debate asks a core question: How should the resourcing of the African Agency be negotiated?
ABOUT THE AFRICAN PUBLIC SQUARE (APS)
The African Leadership Centre established the African Public Square (APS) in 2023 as a platform to harness Africa’s intellectual power and inter-generational agency.
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.
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 (continental) 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.
This is a hybrid event. Please register for in-person attendance, or join this event online.