2025 was a year of transformative resets—in how we understand rising powers, how partnerships are forged and sustained, and how geopolitical forces shape the terms of international cooperation. It also reset expectations around what it takes to turn ambition into delivery.
These shifts reshaped how African actors and their partners negotiate power, finance and technology in a rapidly evolving global order. This series brings together reflections from across APRI's workstreams to make sense of these evolutions. Together, they pose an important question: what does it mean to build for the future when the ground beneath us keeps moving?
Each submission approaches the year from a different vantage point, from early signals around China's next planning cycle to the everyday realities of managing global partnerships; from the evolving geometry of geopolitics and critical minerals to the governance conditions that determine whether green technologies can scale; and from high-level ambition to the practical, incremental work of implementation in national climate transitions.
What connects these contributions is a recognition that African agency is growing—but agency alone is not enough. While African nations are increasingly driving their own agendas, they remain constrained by global structural, regulatory, and institutional frameworks that disproportionately advantage a handful of powerful actors. Taken together, these reflections map a year of adaptation in the international order and surface practical questions for 2026: How do African actors convert new leverage into policy outcomes? How should partners recalibrate their cooperation? And what institutional capacities must be built to translate ambition into sustained delivery?
These questions will guide APRI’s agenda in 2026 as we respond to both a turbulent global environment and our internal need for structural evolution.
