For more than 15 years, the African Union Counter Terrorism Centre (AUCTC) and the Africa Center for Strategic Studies have worked together to strengthen security across the continent. This long-standing collaboration has focused on counterterrorism, combating transnational organized crime, training African security sector professionals, and forming an enduring network of security practitioners equipped to address them. Mr. Idriss Mounir Lallali, a prominent figure in the realm of counterterrorism on the African continent, is a distinguished alumnus of the Africa Center. Since 2017, Mr. Lallali has served as the Deputy Director of the African Union Counter Terrorism Centre, and he has been leading the institution as its Acting Director since April 2019. Mr. Lallali is also the Head of the Alert and Prevention Unit of the African Union. His leadership has been instrumental in guiding a dedicated team of experts to assess the counter-terrorism capacities of African Union (AU) Member States and to support the development of national and regional strategies aimed at countering terrorism. In this interview, we delve into Mr. Lallali’s insights on the current state of terrorism in Africa, the challenges faced by AU Member States, and the strategic initiatives being undertaken to foster a more secure and resilient continent.
Can you tell us about the recently approved African Union Five-Year Strategic Comprehensive Counterterrorism Plan of Action (2026–2030)?
Mr. Idriss Mounir Lallali (IML): The African Union Five-Year Strategic Comprehensive Counterterrorism Plan of Action (2026–2030) represents a decisive inflection point in the continent’s response to terrorism. It is the first time Africa has consolidated, into a single and unified framework, two decades of institutional learning, operational lessons, and evolving threat analysis into a continent-wide implementation roadmap.
The Plan was adopted at expert level during the technical consultation convened by the African Union Counter-Terrorism Centre (AUCTC) in Algiers from 15 to 17 December 2025, against the backdrop of Africa’s confirmation as the global epicenter of terrorism. It is therefore not a theoretical or aspirational document; it is a response to an existential security challenge facing multiple African regions simultaneously.
The very first activity ever conducted by the AUCTC—then the ACSRT—with any international partner was with the Africa Center in 2005. Over two decades later, this partnership has not only endured; it has deepened and adapted to evolving threats.
Three features distinguish this Plan from previous approaches.
First, it introduces implementation discipline. The Plan translates political commitments into operational responsibilities, clarifying roles between the AU, the RECs/RMs, and Member States. It is built around measurable outputs: institutional capacities established, coordination mechanisms activated, early-warning linked to early action, legal instruments operationalized, and interoperability strengthened. This responds directly to the persistent gap between AU decisions and their execution highlighted in recent continental assessments.
Second, the Plan is structured around multi-level synchronization. It treats counterterrorism as a system challenge that must be addressed simultaneously at local, national, regional, and continental levels. This reflects the current nature of the threat, where terrorist organizations operate as transnational mobility and logistics systems rather than territorially fixed insurgencies. Joint planning, cross-border cooperation, intelligence fusion, and operational deconfliction are therefore central pillars.
Third, the Plan reinforces governance, political oversight, and accountability. It builds on AU Assembly and Peace and Security Council decisions that recognize terrorism as a strategic threat to continental stability, sovereignty, and development. It is designed to be overseen through strengthened PSC mechanisms, including the Sub-Committee on Counter-Terrorism, ensuring sustained political anchoring.
In practical terms, the Plan provides Africa with a single continental compass. It is intended to guide not only African action, but also to serve as the reference framework for all international partners engaging on counterterrorism and PVE in Africa.
How does the African Union Counter Terrorism Centre define the importance of local and regional collaboration in addressing today’s terrorism threats in Africa?
IML: The AUCTC defines local and regional collaboration as the center of gravity of effective counterterrorism in Africa because the current threat is simultaneously local in its impact and regional—often continental—in its design and execution.
… resource and sustainability pressures are intensifying. Even where international support exists, sustainable counterterrorism outcomes depend on regional efficiencies, shared capabilities, and predictable financing. Fragmentation increases costs and reduces impact.
At the regional level, the RECs and RMs—recognized as core pillars of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA)—provide the indispensable connective tissue. They enable cross-border coordination, joint threat assessments, intelligence fusion, border management cooperation, and operational synchronization. Terrorist networks exploit borders, corridors, and jurisdictional seams; only regional mechanisms can systematically close those seams.
At the continental level, the AU—through the AUCTC—ensures coherence, standard-setting, political legitimacy, and alignment with continental legal and policy frameworks. This prevents duplication, fragmentation, and dependency.
In line with this logic, the AUCTC has invested heavily in ensuring vertical coherence: that regional counterterrorism strategies and plans of action are aligned with national strategies, and that national experiences feed back into regional and continental planning. This was precisely the rationale behind the recent validation process of the Five-Year Continental Plan of Action with the RECs/RMs.
Within the AUCTC’s CT continental architecture, Regional Focal Points play a critical operational role. Through periodic coordination meetings between the AUCTC and the RECs/RMs, joint capacity-building programs, and structured information-sharing arrangements, we ensure continuity and mutual reinforcement.
The Centre has also actively supported the establishment and strengthening of regional counterterrorism architectures, including Regional Counter-Terrorism Centers, Fusion and Liaison Units in the Sahel, East Africa and Southern Africa, and cooperation frameworks such as the Nouakchott Process, the Djibouti Process, and multinational arrangements including the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF).
Operationally, collaboration is what allows Africa to detect threats earlier, prevent spillover and displacement effects, and deny terrorist organizations the corridors and governance vacuums they deliberately exploit.
What evolving trends in terrorism across the continent make stronger coordination among local, national, and regional actors more urgent than ever?
IML: The urgency of coordination is driven by the structural evolution of terrorism in Africa, as documented by the AUCTC’s Continental Early Warning and Security Outlook.
First, geographic expansion and theatre interconnection have accelerated. Terrorist violence has moved beyond core Sahelian hotspots into coastal West Africa, the Lake Chad Basin, Central Africa, and the Horn. The confirmation of JNIM’s first attack in Nigeria in 2025 and increasing infiltration into Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire demonstrate that the threat is no longer approaching new regions—it is already probing and embedding.
Second, the crime–terror nexus has become structural. Extremist groups are now deeply embedded in illicit economies: artisanal gold mining, fuel trafficking, kidnapping-for-ransom, narcotics routes, timber and wildlife crime, and maritime smuggling. These economies are transnational by nature and cannot be disrupted through isolated national responses.
Third, we face hybridization and fragmentation of armed actors. Groups operate through fluid alliances, splinters, and franchising models, blending ideology with local conflict dynamics. This complicates attribution, targeting, negotiations, and disengagement, making shared situational awareness indispensable.
Fourth, technological acceleration has transformed the battlefield. Terrorist groups increasingly deploy drones, encrypted communications, AI-assisted propaganda, and digital financing tools, compressing decision-making timelines and shortening early-warning windows.
The benchmark of success is not the number of activities delivered, but whether a Member State or region can sustain the capability independently: trained trainers, adopted standard operating procedures, functioning coordination bodies, routine information exchange, and domestic resource allocation.
The data are unequivocal. Africa now accounts for approximately 70–75% of global terrorism fatalities, with thousands of attacks recorded annually. The response must therefore match the scale, speed, and adaptability of the threat.
Can you share examples of successful regional or cross-border initiatives supported by the AUCTC that highlight the value of collaboration?
IML: What consistently proves effective in Africa is what reduces seams between actors.
The Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) in the Lake Chad Basin remains a compelling illustration of multinational cooperation against a cross-border threat. Its value lies not only in joint operations, but in intelligence coordination, shared situational awareness, and sustained political backing.
The establishment of the SADC Regional Counter-Terrorism Centre, alongside Fusion and Liaison Units in the Sahel and East Africa, represents another major step forward. These mechanisms strengthen joint analysis, real-time information exchange, and coordinated responses.
Frameworks such as the Nouakchott Process and the Djibouti Process demonstrate the value of structured regional cooperation when used as operational coordination platforms rather than consultative forums. They facilitate common threat assessments, confidence-building, and interoperability.
The AUCTC’s role across these initiatives is to ensure coherence: harmonizing standards, convening stakeholders, aligning regional efforts with continental policy, and ensuring that regional mechanisms are reinforced—not isolated—within the AU architecture.
What mechanisms exist—or should be strengthened—to ensure that local actors’ insights and experiences inform regional counterterrorism policies?
IML: Several mechanisms exist, but they require stronger institutionalization.
Structured consultation channels must systematically include local authorities, community leaders, women and youth networks, and frontline services in needs assessments, prevention programming, and lessons-learned processes.
Decentralized early-warning systems must be strengthened. Early warning cannot remain capital-centric; it must be field-fed, protected, and linked to rapid response capacity.
Feedback loops through national coordination mechanisms and RECs/RMs must translate local insights into regional planning cycles.
The AUCTC has consistently promoted whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches, emphasizing bottom-up inputs into national and regional PVE Plans of Action. Local ownership is not optional; without it, impact is short-lived and regional cooperation erodes.
Finally, early warning must be matched by early action. Information without response capacity undermines trust and credibility.
How can issues such as information-sharing, capacity gaps, and trust between actors be better addressed?
IML: Information-sharing, capacity gaps, and trust are not three separate challenges; they are a single interdependent system. Weakness in one inevitably undermines the others. Addressing them therefore requires a coherent, sequenced approach that is operational, political, and institutional at the same time.
At its core, information-sharing is not a technical issue; it is a strategic and political one. Actors share information when three conditions are met: (1) a shared understanding of the threat; (2) a shared sense of urgency; and (3) a shared belief that cooperation produces added value.
From an operational standpoint, progress requires agreement on minimum shareable datasets, including incident patterns, modus operandi, mobility corridors, financing indicators, and emerging technologies, governed by clear classification rules and data-protection safeguards. It also requires the institutionalization of fusion routines, not just fusion centers. Regular analytical exchanges—weekly or bi-weekly—create habits of cooperation and normalize sharing. Finally, there is need for a clear value-return logic: contributors must receive timely analytical products, alerts, and actionable insights in return.
Capacity gaps are often approached as a deficit of skills or equipment. In reality, the more critical gap is frequently interoperability—the ability of existing capacities to work together across institutions and borders. Before adding new capabilities, the AUCTC consistently advocates mapping existing national and regional capacities, identifying comparative advantages, and defining a practical division of labor. Many Member States already possess valuable assets—specialized units, analytical expertise, border surveillance tools—but these assets are rarely synchronized.
Effective capacity-building therefore requires moving from isolated training activities to shared operating procedures, joint analytical methodologies, and coordinated operational planning, as well as prioritizing enablers like secure communications, intelligence-analysis capacity, border and mobility monitoring, and financial intelligence linkages. Introducing benchmarking and accreditation mechanisms for national coordination structures is also important, so that capacity-building becomes measurable, cumulative, and sustainable.
Finally, trust is built over time through consistent interaction, predictability, and fairness. In counterterrorism cooperation, trust grows when actors see that information is protected and used responsibly, coordination mechanisms function reliably and transparently, and burdens and risks are shared equitably. Here, operational deconfliction is particularly important, and the development of shared success metrics.
How does the AUCTC work with international partners such as the Africa Center while ensuring effective burden sharing and locally owned counterterrorism solutions?
IML: The partnership model of the African Union Counter-Terrorism Centre is grounded in a clear and deliberate principle: external support must amplify African priorities, not substitute for them. This principle is not ideological; it is operational. Without African ownership, counterterrorism interventions are neither sustainable nor effective.
The AUCTC’s role is to ensure that these strengths are embedded within continental and regional frameworks, complement (rather than compete with) AU and REC/RM initiatives, and strengthen national institutions and coordination mechanisms. This approach ensures genuine burden sharing: African institutions provide strategic direction, political legitimacy, and contextual grounding, while partners contribute specialized expertise and resources.
Effective partnerships are built on comparative advantage, not duplication. Partners such as the Africa Center bring recognized strengths in strategic education, analytical exchange, convening power, and professional military and civilian capacity-building. The AUCTC’s role is to ensure that these strengths are embedded within continental and regional frameworks, complement (rather than compete with) AU and REC/RM initiatives, and strengthen national institutions and coordination mechanisms. This approach ensures genuine burden sharing: African institutions provide strategic direction, political legitimacy, and contextual grounding, while partners contribute specialized expertise and resources.
To maximize impact, the AUCTC promotes joint planning and transparency. This includes shared calendars, coordinated curricula, common outcome indicators, and regular coordination forums. The benchmark of success is not the number of activities delivered, but whether a Member State or region can sustain the capability independently: trained trainers, adopted standard operating procedures, functioning coordination bodies, routine information exchange, and domestic resource allocation.
The partnership between the AUCTC and the Africa Center is exemplary precisely because it reflects these principles. It is built on mutual trust, respect, and a clear understanding of respective mandates and added value. Importantly, it is also longstanding. The very first activity ever conducted by the AUCTC—then the ACSRT—with any international partner was with the Africa Center in 2005. Over two decades later, this partnership has not only endured; it has deepened and adapted to evolving threats. This continuity matters. Long-term partnerships allow for institutional memory, progressive capability development, and honest dialogue about what works and what does not.
Ultimately, the AUCTC advocates a shift from assistance to co-construction. This means joint assessments, joint design, joint delivery, and joint evaluation—anchored in African leadership and aligned with continental frameworks. In an environment where terrorism is adaptive, transnational, and deeply rooted in structural vulnerabilities, only partnerships that respect ownership, reinforce institutions, and share responsibility will produce lasting results.