About Africa Week 2025
Africa Week 2025 will be held from 25 to 27 May 2025 at Future Africa, Hillcrest Campus, University of Pretoria, South Africa. This biennial science summit, hosted by the University of Pretoria, brings together prominent African and global science leaders to address critical global challenges.
Africa Week 2025 will be held under the theme: Global Security – Global Africa. The summit aims to reframe and expand the concept of global security beyond militaristic paradigms, exploring its multifaceted meanings—both hidden and overt—and how they manifest across all levels of society. It seeks to reimagine global security frameworks and critically position Africa within global security complexes.
While the call to silence the guns cannot be overlooked, there is an urgent need to address a broader range of security threats, including pandemics, advancements in information technologies, environmental and human degradation, climate change, and natural disasters.
Africa Week 2025 will serve as a platform to tackle these pressing issues through inclusive and transformative dialogue. It will provide a safe space for deliberation on several key global security questions from an African perspective, including:
- What are the most pressing security threats facing the world today?
- What are the limitations of current governance and policy frameworks in ensuring global security?
- Why are scientists increasingly under threat, and what can be done to address this?
- What should Africa’s primary security concerns be, and how should they be articulated?
- How can Africa contribute meaningfully to global security frameworks?
Delegates will engage these questions through plenary sessions and open debates/discussions with policymakers, activists, academics, civil society, and politicians.
For further enquiries, please contact the Future Africa team at africaweek@futureafrica.science
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“Whatever is driving policy, it is not security – at least security of the population. That is at best a marginal concern. That holds for existential threats as well. We have to look elsewhere.”
– Noam Chomsky, Illegitimate Authority: Facing the Challenges of Our Time (2023)
The complexity of security challenges demands new perspectives that encompass various forms of threats and concerns, as well as strategies to address them. Despite substantial investments in security infrastructure and measures to ‘police the world’, the world has become increasingly insecure. Security issues extend beyond military operations and require an understanding of the intersections between social, cultural, economic, environmental, and political processes, and how these unfold in an unequal world.
Globally, the environment-security nexus has gained significant attention due to the association of environmental refugees with instability and widely publicised accounts of terrorism funding through environmental proceeds. However, these narratives only partially capture the broader security challenges of our time.