In December 2023 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2719, which permits UN assessed contributions to cover up to 75 percent of the annual budget of an African Union-led peace support operation. It was received across the continent as the end of a long argument about who pays for African security. Since then the Council has not authorised a single operation that draws on it. The most significant financing instrument African diplomacy has extracted from the UN system in a generation exists, is in force, and has never been used.
That is not a delay. It is the mechanism working exactly as it was drafted. Resolution 2719 funds operations on a case-by-case basis, which means that every activation is a separate Council decision, and every separate Council decision is a separate opportunity for a permanent member to decline. The framework did not settle the question of who controls African peace enforcement. It relocated the question from an open argument about principle to a recurring procedural gate where the answer can be no without anyone having to say so publicly.
The African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia was the first serious test and it did not clear the gate. Efforts to apply the 2719 framework to AUSSOM, with 75 percent through assessed contributions and the balance mobilised jointly, failed to reach consensus because of United States objections. The mission’s mandate was extended instead by Resolution 2809 in December 2025, running to 31 December 2026, with the Council asking the AU to submit updated plans that account for the absence of financing. A mission was told to keep operating and to explain how it would do so unfunded.
Case By Case Is Not a Detail. It Is the Whole Instrument.
Read the architecture as a distribution of decision rights rather than of money. Under a standing entitlement, an African-led operation that met agreed criteria would draw assessed funding automatically, and a permanent member wishing to stop it would have to act, visibly, against a rule. Under case-by-case authorisation, the default is that nothing happens, and a permanent member wishing to stop it need only decline to agree. The burden of initiative has been transferred to the party with the least leverage.
Three obstacles are usually cited for the impasse: political division within the Council, the UN’s own liquidity crisis as member states fall behind on assessed contributions, and delays in implementing the AU-UN roadmap for operationalising the resolution. The first is a veto by another name. The second is real and affects every mission. The third is the most quietly damaging, because a framework that requires joint planning modalities, eligible-cost definitions, compliance certification, and reimbursement rules to be agreed before it can be activated has built its own approval chain, and each link in that chain is a place where an operation can be slowed by a party that never has to oppose it outright.
Predictable funding is not the opposite of dependency. It is a more formal and more negotiable kind of dependency, and its value depends entirely on who controls the conditions.
The Mandate Was Renewed. The Support Was Withdrawn.
The clearest illustration of how authority now separates from money came in 2026, when the United States announced it would no longer support the UN Support Office in Somalia beyond 31 December 2026, while indicating it would not use its veto to block renewal of AUSSOM’s mandate. The mission keeps its legal authorisation and loses the logistical and operational scaffolding that made the authorisation executable.
That combination should be studied carefully by every African defence ministry, because it is the template. A mandate is a statement about legitimacy and costs the issuing state nothing. Sustainment is a statement about capability and costs a great deal. Separating them allows an external actor to remain formally supportive of African-led security while withdrawing the conditions under which African-led security can actually be conducted. The mission’s arrears already stand at $93.9 million against confirmed pledges of roughly $120 million, figures that describe not a shortfall but an operating model built on annual appeals.
The Levy Africa Voted For and Did Not Collect
An account that stops at Washington and New York would fail the standard this publication applies to every other actor. In 2016 at Kigali, the AU Assembly adopted a 0.2 percent levy on eligible imports to finance the Union, endow the Peace Fund with $400 million in member-state contributions, and cover up to a quarter of the cost of peace support operations. The levy was projected to raise in the region of $1.2 billion a year. Roughly 26 member states have still not fully incorporated it into domestic law.
That single fact reframes the entire negotiation. African governments went to the Security Council to argue that African-led operations deserved predictable external funding while a decade-old decision to generate predictable internal funding sat unimplemented in more than half the membership. In July 2026 the AU Commission chairperson, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, was again calling on member states to accelerate the Peace Fund, implement the levy in full, and raise direct contributions to peace operations, which is the same appeal that has been made in substantially the same terms for the better part of a decade.
The uncomfortable reading is that the two failures are connected. A financing claim is strongest when the claimant is visibly funding what it can. Every year the levy goes uncollected is a year in which the argument for assessed contributions is made from a weaker position, and in which the case-by-case gate is easier to hold shut on the grounds that African commitment is itself conditional.
The Map That Would Change the Argument
The instrument this system lacks is a published financing-and-authority map attached to every operation proposed under Resolution 2719. It would name, before deployment, who authorises, who funds each share, who certifies compliance, who approves an eligible cost, who reimburses on what schedule, and which specific body is responsible for each point at which the process can stall. It would convert an opaque approval chain into a document with names against delays.
That is a modest instrument for a large problem, and it is chosen precisely because it requires nobody’s consent to produce. The AU can publish it unilaterally. Its effect would be to move the argument from the register of appeal, where African institutions ask for predictability, into the register of audit, where the parties that produce unpredictability are identified in a public record.
The verdict is that Resolution 2719 has already answered the question African diplomacy asked of it, and the answer was not the one that was celebrated. The continent did not win the right to be funded. It won the right to apply, each time, to a body where one member can decline without explanation, and it did so while leaving its own levy uncollected in half its capitals. Money was never the thing being negotiated. The trigger was, and it is still held in New York.
