Professor Eka Ikpe – the director of the African Leadership Centre at King’s College London and professor of Development Economics at the African Public Square Global Edition open debate. Photo: Supplied
The call for innovation and preparedness in a multipolar world, highlighted at the recent global edition of the African Public Square open debate, points to a core concern: what resources are required to make African agency real? This question has been recurring since the 1960s independence period. African public intellectuals such as Claude Ake, Thandika Mkandawire, Amilcar Cabral and Kwame Nkrumah have repeatedly concerned themselves with how African societies can act with purpose and autonomy in a global system that has historically limited their choices.
Among others, these public intellectuals examined the structural forces shaping Africa’s development, asking how the continent can move from the margins of the global system to a position of strategic agency. Understanding innovation and preparedness in a multipolar world therefore requires grounding these ideas within a broader Pan-African intellectual tradition. At its core, this tradition points to three interconnected pillars: material capabilities, institutional capacities and ideational autonomy. Together, these form the basis for resourcing African agency in an increasingly polarised global order.
The pursuit of agency has historically been complicated by Africa’s integration into an unequal global economy under exploitative institutional arrangements, including in trade, the global division of labour, finance, and industrial production, with few exceptions. In 2025, UNCTAD noted that about 70% of African economies remain commodity dependent. Some of the most pertinent recent global concerns evidence the enduring coloniality, and core–periphery dynamics, of global economic structures. These include the extraction of raw materials from the continent to support clean energy transitions beyond its shores; constraining intellectual property and manufacturing regimes that undermined health sovereignty, as witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic; and expanding technological uptake troubled by questions of digital sovereignty. This pattern, which has persisted into the present, risks reinforcing forms of exploitation, dispossession, and dependency that continuously constrain autonomous and self-reliant transformation.
As global power relations shift toward a more multipolar configuration, the emergence of new economic powers and changing patterns of trade and investment may expand opportunities for African states. However, these shifts do not automatically dismantle the structural inequalities embedded within the global system. Agency therefore still depends on the deliberate cultivation of strategic capabilities.
The first dimension of the resources required for exercising effective African agency concerns material capabilities. These include industrial capacity, technological infrastructure, financial resources and the broader economic foundations that enable states to pursue independent and progressive development strategies. Without such capabilities, political sovereignty risks becoming largely symbolic, as states that lack productive autonomy often remain dependent on external resourcing. This dependency significantly narrows the policy options available to African states. For Africa, rebuilding such capacities requires renewed attention to industrial policy, technological upgrading, and the strategic management of natural resources, especially as the importance of material resources has become even more apparent in the contemporary global economy. Technological change, digital transformation, and the transition toward renewable energy systems are reshaping patterns of production and trade. For African countries, the challenge is not merely to participate in these transformations, but to do so in ways that enhance domestic production capabilities, for both domestic consumption and needs as well as for global markets, in order to move beyond reinforcing dependency.
The translation of economic resources into development outcomes requires visionary leadership and institutions that centre such strategies. Opportunities for resourcing African agency persist within African contexts, with global interest in minerals and fuels, particularly green minerals, positioning Africa as a key site; growing trade interactions with Global South actors, including Middle Eastern economies and China; and domestic capital resources; technological expansion; and a vibrant youth population engaged through social movements and innovation across technology, creative economies, education and knowledge systems.
In this instance, institutional resources include the capacity of the state to formulate and implement coherent policies, understand and manage its interactions and interdependencies with markets and societies, and to do so with concerns for social justice and equity, moving beyond extractive logics that are too often dominant. Sustained development and progress require moving beyond capitalist production aimed solely at surplus generation, toward deliberate consideration of who benefits across demographic and social groups. Such an approach would distinguish African states and institutions from inherited exploitative capacities that were often embedded in institutional logics. Elements of these alternative approaches emerged in the post-independence period, including professionalised bureaucracies that were mission-driven and oriented toward long-term planning for industrial transformation. Many of these initiatives were prematurely disrupted by the 1970s petroleum crises in the Middle East, in ways reminiscent of current global energy disruptions linked to the 2026 US-Israel war in Iran.
Strategic autonomy in Africa must also rely on collective approaches. Regional institutions have played, and continue to play, a crucial role in resourcing African agency; the continent has over 150 such institutions, evidencing how deeply collective modes of knowing and doing are embedded in African praxis. The African Union’s African Continental Free Trade Area builds on progressive commitments, including the Lagos Plan of Action and the African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation. These initiatives seek to enhance collective bargaining power and deepen regional economic and trade integration as part of global engagement. By privileging and enabling intra-African trade, there are possibilities for collaborative, higher-value industrial production, the building of reliable and proximate markets that reflect African needs and collective export bases better positioned to engage global economies.
Regional development finance institutions are crucial components in materially resourcing and coordinating visionary agendas that extend beyond narrow national interests while carefully building on them. The work of Afreximbank, the African Development Bank, the African Finance Corporation, among others, speaks to this. These efforts include the creation of continental payments and settlement systems to navigate inefficient dollarisation, regional and continental physical infrastructure development and negotiations with global finance regimes whose credit and debt frameworks unfairly penalise the continent. These imperatives underline the necessity of collective ambition toward transformation, but they must also centre an attentiveness to justice and equity among states and peoples and alignment with longer-term developmental agendas.
A significant dimension of African agency concerns ideational resources: the ideas, conceptual frameworks and intellectual traditions through which societies interpret their circumstances and imagine change. Ideational resources shape the boundaries of political imagination. The ideas held by decision-makers about development, transformation and change influence how governance and global engagement are conceptualised, with implications for domestic strategies and international positioning. Where knowledge is recognised as residing is therefore central to expanding political imaginaries, both for domestic transformation and for Africa’s dialectical relationship with the global system.
The role of an intergenerational community of public intellectuals is especially crucial, particularly when grappling with the prioritisation of diverse African ways of knowing within inherently hierarchical global knowledge systems. Claude Ake was clear about the limitations of mainstream social sciences, particularly their tendency to treat change and movement in complex social worlds as aberrations. Knowledge systems structured in this way risk dismissing such “aberrations” as deviations from implicit norms, thereby neglecting approaches better suited to understanding complex realities, such as the simultaneous construction of Africa as both a space of deprivation and a site of extractive abundance. Public intellectuals must therefore centre Africa itself as a source of knowledge, treating its experiences as sites of concept-building and imagining new ways of doing and being, while drawing also on wider knowledge and technologies with awareness of embedded hierarchies. An example is Eiman Zein-Elabdin’s call to understand economic value and valuation in relation to power and justice, beyond commodity prices in global markets.
The current global system is undergoing significant transitions beyond unipolarity. Challenges to Western economic dominance, alongside the rise of new power centres, are intensifying geopolitical competition and contributing to a more multipolar international order. This presents opportunities for African countries to pursue strategic engagement in support of inclusive transformation. Multiple external partners may expand possibilities and flexibility in trade, investment, and technological cooperation. Yet risks also arise from the replication of core–periphery dynamics within new semi-peripheral contexts, where production relations reproduce extractive logics. Complexities emerge in the coexistence of diversified partnerships that have driven infrastructural expansion, particularly in transport through Africa–China relations, while simultaneously constraining economic activities to extractive sectors such as fuels and minerals, including green minerals, in relations with both China and Middle Eastern economies. Conceptualising development and transformation as underpinning logics is therefore essential, and must be centred on transformation that is productive, generative and autonomous (without autarky) as is careful attention to how these logics are designed with justice and equity at local, national, and regional scales.
The call for innovation and preparedness in a multipolar world is thus embedded in reflections on material, institutional and ideational resources. It encapsulates a rich intellectual tradition within African political economy that requires renewed engagement for the exercise of meaningful agency. The urgency of the present moment is to identify pathways toward greater autonomy, recognising that agency is not given but built. It emerges from the deliberate cultivation of economic capabilities, the rethinking of state–market–society interdependencies, the centring of equity and justice in institutional frameworks and the strengthening of intellectual traditions capable of interpreting and responding to complex global realities organised around (shared) African priorities. In a world of diffusing power and rapidly shifting dynamics, resourcing African agency requires strategic clarity and sustained investment in these foundational resources. Innovation and preparedness are therefore not abstract ideals, but practical imperatives for navigating the uncertainties of twenty-first-century global disorder with an African centre.
Professor Eka Ikpe is the director of the African Leadership Centre at King’s College London and professor of Development Economics.
Library
Read More