Chinese-hosted debates about the end of the liberal order were often more realistic than Western ones. The harder task now is for Africa, and Somalia in particular, to survive and shape the rivalrous world those debates foresaw.
In the summer of 2019, as foreign policy elites gathered at Tsinghua University’s World Peace Forum in Beijing, the talk was of “stabilising the world order”.
The title sounded reassuring, the mood less so. Former presidents and prime ministers spoke of “changes unseen in a century”, of fraying trust and a multilateral system creaking under the strain. On stage were figures such as Megawati Soekarnoputri, Indonesia’s former president, Herman Van Rompuy, the former president of the European Council, and Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s former president, alongside China’s Fu Ying and American scholars like Graham Allison. One European grandee declared that “the era of comfortable assumptions is over”, warning that neither Washington nor Beijing could guarantee order on their own. Honoured to be invited as Somalia’s ambassador, participation extended beyond listening. Later sessions included panels on Africa’s development and regional security, with contributions to discussions on debt relief, peace operations and China-Africa cooperation.
The World Peace Forum is an annual security conference hosted by Tsinghua and co-organised with the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs. Between its 8th edition in 2019 and its 12th in 2024, the Forum’s themes trace a neat arc. In 2019 the focus was “Stabilizing the World Order: Common Responsibilities, Joint Management, and Shared Benefits”. In 2021 it turned to “International Security Cooperation in the Post-Pandemic Era”. In 2023 it considered a “new world order in the making”. By 2024 the slogan was “Improving Global Security Governance: Justice, Unity, and Cooperation”.
The argument is straightforward. Chinese-hosted debates about the erosion of the old order were often more realistic than many Western conversations at the time. Yet for all their foresight about rivalry, institutional fatigue and parallel governance structures, they left Africa’s agency underdeveloped. For Somalia, that is not merely an analytical gap. It is a survival question.
With hindsight, Beijing’s scribes were prescient. They saw three trends that now define Africa’s external environment.
First, multipolar rivalry. The Forum’s documents and debates treated the unipolar moment as over and asked whether the world was heading for bipolarity or looser multipolarity, a polite way of saying that America’s primacy would be contested. The answer today is obvious. Africa operates in a marketplace of great-power suitors, from China and Russia to Europe, the Gulf and a more transactional America.
Second, multilateral fatigue. Panels on multilateralism versus unilateralism and global security governance fretted about institutional gridlock. They warned that the UN system, the WTO and other large-member forums would struggle to cope with rising mistrust and proliferating crises. Subsequent years have confirmed the diagnosis. On pandemics, trade and hard security, multilateral machinery has often looked stuck.
Third, parallel architectures. Even before BRICS expanded and the Global South became fashionable in Western think-tanks, the Forum gave serious space to BRICS, China’s Global Security Initiative and other alternative arrangements. Security was defined broadly, encompassing humanitarian norms, technology, AI, climate and economic risk, not just tanks and missiles. In other words, the World Peace Forum anticipated that global governance would be contested across multiple domains by multiple centres of power.
All this matters for Africa. It suggests that the continent is not drifting into an unforeseen storm. The rivalrous, institutionally fatigued world now being dissected in Western magazines was already being mapped out in Beijing between 2019 and 2024.
Yet the story is not simply one of Chinese foresight. There is also a blind spot, and it concerns Africa’s role.
Africa was prominent in the narrative, less so in the design. The Forum devoted sessions to Africa’s development and regional security and highlighted China-Africa cooperation for high-quality development. African envoys, including Somalia’s, used these sessions to emphasise how infrastructure, debt relief and peace operations were reshaping their countries’ external relationships, often faster than formal foreign-policy doctrines could keep up. One African speaker remarked that Africa is no longer just a destination for investment, it is a test case for whether global security governance can be fair. The line drew approving nods. It did not, however, trigger a detailed discussion of how fairness might be built into the wiring of new institutions.
In the Forum’s schemes for joint management of global security, the leading roles were reserved for major powers and a handful of middle ones. The African Union and regional economic communities were praised for mediation and peacekeeping, but mostly as implementers of decisions taken elsewhere. Africa appeared as partner and theatre. Important, but not quite an architect of the emerging order.
There was a second blind spot. While Forum panellists worried at length about multilateral paralysis in New York and Geneva, they devoted less energy to the more mundane question of domestic state capacity in Africa. Constitutional uncertainty, weak parliaments, strained fiscal systems and fragile bureaucracies were not centre-stage topics. Yet these internal realities determine whether African states can treat external offers, from port deals to peace support operations, as strategic choices rather than emergencies. A continent of weak states will struggle to act as agent in any global architecture, however enlightened, and will tend to function as arena instead.
For African policymakers, the combination of accurate macro diagnosis and thin African agency ought to be uncomfortable. For Somalia, it is existential. Others have done much of the strategic thinking about the rivalrous world in which the country now sits, but Somalis have not yet fully answered the question of what role the state intends to play in it.
Survival in this environment will not be secured by another speech about partnership. It starts with treating Somalia’s core institutions, parliament, judiciary, executive, security agencies and fiscal authorities, as the first line of defence in a rivalrous world. The country needs a clear, nationally anchored foreign-policy posture for engaging major powers on debt, investment and security, so that offers from China, Gulf partners, Western donors or regional neighbours are weighed against long-term sovereignty rather than short-term relief.
It also requires building enough capacity at home to turn external proposals into strategy instead of dependency. Without stronger legal oversight, budgeting and civil-service competence, Somalia risks becoming an arena where external actors compete, rather than an agent that uses competition to its advantage. In a world of overlapping architectures, survival depends as much on institutional resilience as on the flag over the embassy.
Finally, Somalia will have to use African and regional platforms more deliberately. The African Union, IGAD and other mechanisms are not only venues for crisis management, they are spaces where rules for peace operations, debt treatment and external military presence are debated. If Somalia wants to survive and eventually shape its environment, it cannot afford to be silent or fragmented in those rooms.
Beijing’s World Peace Forum has, over the past half decade, done something useful. It has helped normalise the idea that global order is contested, that multilateralism is strained and that governance will be stitched together by overlapping arrangements. For Africa, the risk now is arriving late, or poorly prepared, to the business of rule-making in this messier world. For Somalia, the risk is starker. It is to be ruled by that world, rather than to survive and gradually claim a voice within it.
Awale Kullane is a Somali diplomat, political analyst and former ambassador. He has served in senior diplomatic roles, including as Somalia’s ambassador to China and Sweden and as deputy permanent representative to the United Nations. His writing focuses on governance, constitutional reform, regional security and Africa’s place in a changing international order.