Academic Conference on Africa 2025

Theme

Seizing the Moment: The African State and Its Promise

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Summary

The UN Office of the Special Adviser on Africa (OSAA) is convening the 2025 Academic Conference on Africa under the theme: "Seizing the Moment: The African State and Its Promise."

This is the third in a groundbreaking series that has become a platform for intellectual disruption and policy innovation. It elevates African scholarship in global discourse and links research to action. More than an academic gathering, it is a space for forward-looking dialogue where Africa’s leading thinkers, policymakers, and practitioners confront urgent challenges from distinctly African perspectives.

This year’s theme is both a challenge and a call to action. It invites leaders and scholars to reflect on the State’s indispensable role in peace and development and to reimagine its renewal.

The Conference will advance this vision through three interlocking themes:

• The State of the State in Africa: Presence, Perception, and Performance in a Changing World

This session will interrogate the historical and structural roots of State absence and its far-reaching consequences for peace, security and development today.

• Transforming the State, Reclaiming the Future: Pathways to African Renewal

This session will engage directly with the African Union’s 2025 theme on reparations, broadening the lens beyond compensation to embrace a vision of structural justice: ending the perpetuation of wrongs through contemporary systems, while restoring sovereignty and capacity. Discussions will explore institutional, fiscal, and governance innovations to strengthen effectiveness and legitimacy, from domestic resource mobilization to financial governance and renewal of the social contract.

• Ideas That Build Nations: Leveraging African Scholarship for a New Era of Policymaking

This session will focus on strategies to elevate African intellectual leadership as central to reframing debates, bridging research and policymaking to generate transformative approaches to governance, justice, and development.

About the Academic Conference on Africa

In an effort to strengthen African representation in global development scholarship and ensure that African voices are heard in the debates that help to shape the continent’s future, OSAA launched the annual Academic Conference on Africa in 2023. The conference aims to provide a platform for African scholarship that addresses the wide-ranging scope of Africa’s development, with particular emphasis on the nexus of development, peace and security, humanitarian work and human rights.
The academic conference brings together African scholars, policymakers, and practitioners from different sectors and disciplines to engage in high-level interactive dialogue on the most pressing issues facing African communities.

Together, let us reimagine Africa’s future!

Related documents

Concept note (coming soon!)