The last year has felt disorienting to many, headspinning to most. We are witnessing a real-time remaking of global politics and the world economy, a shift so profound and so contradictory that the old world is fading while the new one struggles to be born.

At Africa Practice, we believe that navigating this requires more than just standard forecasting. It demands a specific kind of Futures Thinking. One that combines methodological frameworks with deep, human intelligence, and the courage to actively shape the future we cannot yet see.

Today, we are launching “When the rules break” a synthesis of our findings from a collective process of rigorous research, peering through the looking glass from our unique vantage points in hubs across seven African countries, and envisioning bold futures. Our aim with this piece and the thematic deep-dives that will follow in this series is to engage you, our partners, and all of our collective experiences to ask and answer a number of deeply reflective questions about what lies ahead, who will guide us there, and how we want to show up in this emerging world.

At recent global summits, Western leaders have been mourning the death of a “rules-based order.” But for much of the world – and for Africa in particular – this order was often a polite fiction. What may have appeared as occasional systemic failures were intentional outcomes that reflected a framework functioning exactly as designed to serve the interests of its creators.

We aren’t saying that the current shifts aren’t transformative. They are set to be the most disruptive in a lifetime. It will be as transformational for Africa as the transition to independence in 1960 and the institutionalisation of great power hegemony that was codified in the UN in the 1970s. What we are saying is that the way Africa is transformed is in our hands.

The decisions made fifty years ago defined the growth and development of our continent for more than 60 years. Africa took its independence from direct rule – but entered a global system that embedded great power influence and control in a small group of powerful states. The shape of the world order that was created then has endured, through a series of transitions, but it is now being threatened, with no clear replacement yet emerging.

The unravelling of the facade of multilateralism is accelerated by rapidly evolving advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), a demographic inversion juxtaposing the ageing West against a hyper-youthful Africa, and the urgent mandate of climate change. In this environment, Africa’s digitally fluent youth are mobilising, but face a global rise in technoauthoritarianism and the trust-eroding twin threats of synthetic reality and quantum surveillance. This era sees the traditional nation-state besieged by powerful mega-corporations, private capital, and criminal and ideological networks, while conventional state capacity degrades.

If all of the above is true – and we believe it is – then what and how should we prepare ourselves for?