BEYOND THE JOG: WHAT THE AFRICA FORWARD SUMMIT ACTUALLY SAID ABOUT PEACE, POWER AND DISARMAMENT


This article is written by Sahlim Charles, a Council Member at the International Peace Bureau and enthusiastic about Disarmament and Militarization discourse. Sahlim is also the Founder and Executive Director of Re-Imagining New Communities.

I took time to analyze the stakes at the Africa Forward Summit 2026 co-hosted by Kenya and France in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi between 11–12 May 2026. Much of the global commentary that followed fixated on the theatre of the event that included President Emmanuel Macron’s early-morning jog with Eliud Kipchoge, the sports demonstrations and youth pavilions. That imagery did its job.  Designed to signal warmth and reset after decades of a more transactional, extractive French posture on the continent.

But as peace and security practitioner interested in cross-border issues, my interest was beyond the choreography to the architecture underneath it. And underneath it, Africa Forward 2026 was not simply a trade summit that happened to include a “Peace & Security” plenary as a courtesy panel. It landed at a genuine hinge point in the security relationship between France and the continent that’s been shaped by three converging trends including the collapse of France’s military footprint in West Africa, a hesitant and underfunded new architecture for African-led peacekeeping and a quiet re-militarization of the relationship through the back door of “defense cooperation,” this time in Anglophone East Africa rather than the Francophone speaking African region. 

In this article, you will read my thoughts on what the summit actually committed to in terms of peace and security, what it conspicuously avoided saying about arms and disarmament, and what that combination should mean for international organizations and bodies focusing on disarmament and militarization.

Let’s contextualize this

To understand why Nairobi mattered strategically, you have to understand what France no longer has. Since 2022, French forces have been eased out of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire and, as of mid-2025, Senegal — a wave some analysts have dubbed an “African Frexit.” What remains of France’s once-continental footprint is now essentially two postings: a shared camp arrangement in Gabon and the one genuinely permanent base in Djibouti positioned deliberately as a launch pad for future African missions rather than a leftover of empire.

Macron hasn’t taken these events gracefully. In a January 2025 address to French ambassadors, he complained that Sahelian governments had “forgotten to say thank you” for a decade of counterterrorism support. His remarks landed badly across the region and hardened, rather than softened, the sense that French withdrawal was being framed by Paris as ingratitude rather than as African states reclaiming security sovereignty. It is against that backdrop, a security relationship that collapsed, not one that evolved gracefully, that Africa Forward 2026 has to be read. This was not France’s first Africa summit. The France–Africa Summit format dates to 1973. What made Nairobi genuinely new and what French and Kenyan officials repeatedly stressed, was that it was the first time the format was held in and co-chaired by, a non-Francophone, English-speaking state away from a Sahel that expelled French troops and toward a Kenya that has been actively inviting them in.

The New Pact In Place

My interest and focus of the work I do couldn’t let me ignore this part and this is mainly because most of the coverage focused on the trade aspect of the convening. 

Roughly seven months before the summit, on 29 October 2025, Kenya’s Defense Cabinet Secretary Soipan Tuya and France’s ambassador Arnaud Suquet signed a five-year, automatically renewable Defense Cooperation Agreement, ratified by Kenya’s National Assembly in April 2026 a few days before the summit opened. The agreement covers training, joint exercises, intelligence-sharing, maritime security and reciprocal troop deployment and in March 2026 roughly 800 French military personnel arrived in Mombasa aboard French naval vessels for joint exercises with the Kenya Defense Forces — timed conspicuously close to the Nairobi summit.

Following closely on this development the substance that should draw scrutiny is not that Kenya and France are cooperating militarily.  States do this constantly.  What we should be keen on is the specific legal architecture of the pact. The cooperation grants visiting French forces primary jurisdiction over their own personnel for on-duty offences, extends tax and customs exemptions and channels disputes through diplomatic rather than judicial mechanisms — provisions several interested parties have compared to the Kenya–UK Status of Forces Agreement, which has been widely criticized over its handling of cases involving British soldiers, including the unresolved 2012 killing of Agnes Wanjiru. Kenyan defense committee chair Nelson Koech has publicly rejected the “immunity” framing, insisting crimes such as murder remain triable in Kenyan courts. That dispute over interpretation is itself the point: an agreement this consequential to sovereignty and to civilian protection was negotiated with limited public participation. 

Read alongside the Sahel withdrawal, this is not de-militarization. It is relocation. France’s security relationship with Africa has not shrunk so much as shifted its center of gravity from West to East Africa, from Francophone to Anglophone partners, and from a discredited counterterrorism model to a “maritime security and Indian Ocean stability” framing that is, structurally, still about basing rights, troop presence and legal privilege.

Was there any commitment on Peace and Security at the Nairobi Declaration?

The summit did not treat peace and security as an afterthought on paper, whatever its economic branding suggested. It devoted a substantive section to the subject and leaders present committed to a number of things including 1) Reaffirming support for implementing UN Security Council Resolution 2719 (2023) to secure predictable, sustainable funding for AU-led peace operations, 2) Backing African-led conflict resolution rather than externally directed intervention and 3) The leaders flagging terrorism, violent extremism and instability specifically in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia the Sahel and the Great Lakes region.

That last point matters for calibrating expectations as this was a general statement of concern about the Great Lakes crisis (M23, Rwanda–DRC tensions, the Allied Democratic Forces) rather than a dedicated negotiating forum for it. The actual mediation machinery on eastern DRC runs through separate channels — the AU-led process chaired by Togolese President Faure Gnassingbé, plus the Doha and Washington tracks — which the AU and UN reaffirmed days later, on 13 May, at their Tenth Annual Conference in Addis Ababa. Africa Forward 2026 gestured at these crises rhetorically; it did not attempt to substitute for the dedicated diplomatic tracks already working them.

The Gap Between the Words and the Money: UNSCR 2719

Passed unanimously in December 2023, UNSCR 2719 was meant to be a watershed, permitting up to 75% of an AU-led peace support operation’s budget to come from UN assessed contributions, with the AU responsible for mobilizing the rest. Two and a half years later, it has never actually been triggered. An attempt to apply it to the AU Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) collapsed for lack of Security Council consensus; as of March 2025, AUSSOM needed $90.4 million for a six-month funding cycle and had secured only about 18.5% of that figure from the AU Peace Fund, China, Japan and South Korea combined as reported by DIIS.  By late 2025, unpaid dues to UN peacekeeping generally had climbed to roughly $1.6 billion, prompting the Secretary-General to propose a 15% cut to the 2026 peacekeeping budget — a cut that would eliminate more than 18% of associated jobs and further chills Security Council appetite for authorizing a new 2719 mission at exactly the moment African states most need one.

So, who bears the cost of underfunded peace operations. As one AU official close to the negotiations put it in reporting on the resolution, the burden-sharing arithmetic behind “25% AU-financed” was never made concrete and African officials have pushed back hard on the framing that money is the primary sacrifice, given that African troop-contributing states are the ones absorbing the casualties. Nairobi’s declaration reaffirming support for 2719 is welcome, but reaffirmation is not the same as unblocking it. A genuinely useful outcome from a summit of this profile would have been a concrete commitment and not a further restatement of a two-year-old resolution that both the AU and UN openly acknowledge is stalled.

The Disarmament Discussion

I would have wished that this conversation was included in the agenda especially looking at the above scenarios but nowhere in the public record of the Nairobi Declaration, the summit’s own thematic roundtables or the surrounding commentary is there any substantive language on conventional arms control, small arms and light weapons proliferation or French arms export practices to the continent. This is despite the summit convening at the same moment France cemented its position as the world’s second-largest arms exporter, with exports having risen over the 2021–25 period even as European demand dominated the picture.

France does maintain a formal disarmament posture on paper as its Foreign Ministry cites commitments to the UN Register of Conventional Arms, support for adding a SALW category to that register and the 2005 International Tracing Instrument it co-sponsored with Switzerland. None of that machinery featured in the Africa Forward agenda. A summit that convened 1,500-plus business leaders and thirty-plus CEOs to discuss “bankable projects,” while its defense-adjacent content was limited to peacekeeping-financing language and a bilateral basing agreement, tells you where the institutional energy actually sits. Growth financing and market access and not the arms flow that fuel the very conflicts within the continent and more specifically across Sahel, Sudan, DRC and Somalia. So peace and security got a plenary, disarmament got nothing.

Civil Society Take and Counter-Gathering

It would be incomplete to treat the summit purely as elite diplomacy without noting that a substantial counter-mobilization was organized around it. A coalition under the banner Pan-Africanism Summit Against Imperialism (PASAI) 2026 convened a parallel event in Nairobi explicitly framing the summit as a rebranded continuation of French influence-seeking following its expulsion from the Sahel, this time using Kenya as what organizers called “the principal gateway” into East Africa.

Conclusion

Africa Forward 2026 was genuinely significant. The first Africa-France summit hosted by a non-Francophone state, a real declaration with real language on AU peace architecture and a real $27 billion investment package. But underneath the jog with Kipchoge and the “Jerusalema” dance sits a security relationship being quietly re-anchored in East Africa on terms that have not yet had the scrutiny that West Africa’s collapsed arrangements eventually received and a disarmament conversation that, on the current record, simply didn’t happen. For those interested, that combination on real peacekeeping commitments, unfunded; real militarization, unexamined; real arms flows, unmentioned, is the actual story of Nairobi.

Here are several sources to read more about the summit and related conversations 

For further details or to discuss this article, please contact Sahlim Charles:

Email: sahlimcharles@gmail.com
Mobile: +254 (0) 719 636 726
Social media: @sahlimcharles (FB | TW | IG)

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