The soldiers who gathered in South Africa’s Northern Cape in 2015 were rehearsing for a crisis that had not happened. Their exercise, Amani Africa II, imagined a member state tipping toward collapse, civilians in danger, and a multinational force that had days to move. It was, on paper, the moment the African Standby Force had been built for.

The drill showed how much coordination was possible. It also showed how much readiness was still missing. By then the ASF was already a decade past its founding promise and running late on its 2010 deadline. It has now marked twenty years, and the question is no longer just whether the force is ready. It is whether the idea has made African peacekeeping more effective at all.

A standing promise, not yet a standing force

The African Standby Force, or ASF, is a standing multinational arrangement of military, police, civilian and specialist components that the African Union and regional blocs can call on for peace support operations. Its legal foundation is Article 13 of the Protocol Relating to the Establishment of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union, adopted in Durban in 2002 and in force from 2003.

The design was regional. Five standby arrangements cover the continent: the Eastern Africa Standby Force, the ECOWAS Standby Force, the Central African FOMAC, the North African Regional Capability and the SADC Standby Force. The protocol listed six graduated deployment scenarios. They start with military advice to a political mission and end with intervention in genocide or other grave circumstances.

The first target date for full operational capability was 2010. It slipped. Amani Africa II, held with thousands of participants in 2015, was supposed to certify readiness. By the time it ended, the AU was careful about claiming too much.

The record: missions without the ASF’s name

The central fact is abrupt: the ASF has never deployed as itself. The African Union Peace and Security Council and regional bodies have run real operations in Burundi, Sudan, Somalia, the Central African Republic, the Lake Chad Basin and elsewhere. Those missions were assembled as coalitions after the fact, not drawn from a standing force.

That distinction matters because ad hoc missions start slowly. When al-Shabaab gained ground in Somalia, the African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM, deployed from 2007 with troop contributors signing up country by country. The mission did serious work and later became the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia. It was not the rapid-response force Durban envisioned. The same pattern appeared in The Gambia in January 2017. ECOWAS troops crossed the border after Yahya Jammeh refused to leave office. The intervention worked quickly, but it was a regional coalition, not a certified standby brigade.

Southern Africa’s clearest recent case is the SADC Mission in Mozambique, known as SAMIM. It deployed in 2021 to help Mozambican forces fight insurgents in Cabo Delgado, included South African troops, and ran until mid-2024. Again, a regional body did the job while the ASF’s formal roster stayed in the background.

United Nations peacekeeping has long operated alongside these African missions. The pattern has been a patchwork of funding, mandates and troop contributors negotiated after a crisis is already burning, not a clean handover from standby force to UN mission.

The case for the standby force

The strongest argument for the ASF is not deployments. It is the framework. Before the ASF, African states had no shared doctrine for standby deployment across civilian, military, police and specialist roles. The force gave planners a common list of capabilities, joint training modules and regular exercises. It also pushed the African Union and regional bodies to build civilian protection, gender and conduct standards into mission preparation.

The standby arrangements have produced real capacity, uneven though it is. The Eastern Africa Standby Force has run command post exercises and keeps rotating rosters. ECOWAS has used its own arrangement in repeated West African interventions, most visibly in The Gambia. The Southern African Development Community operation in Mozambique showed that Southern African countries can deploy together under a regional mandate, even when the formal standby label is absent.

There is a political argument too. The ASF embodies the African Union’s right to move without waiting for the UN Security Council. In a crisis where the Council is slow or split, an African standby force could act first. That lever has been used rarely, but its existence changes the conversation.

Supporters point to UN Security Council Resolution 2719, adopted at the end of 2023, which opened a pathway for UN assessed contributions to fund African Union-led peace support operations. If implemented, that money could make standby capacity more than a paper commitment.

The case against the current form

The sceptical answer starts with the same fact supporters cite: in twenty years, the ASF has not deployed under its own mandate. A standby force that is never stood up is a planning process. Every major African crisis since 2003 has been met by improvised coalitions, donor-funded missions or bilateral deployments. Rwanda’s forces in Mozambique and the East African Community’s now-ended regional force in eastern DRC sit outside the ASF’s command.

Funding is the deepest structural problem. The AU’s Peace Fund remains a fraction of what African peace operations cost. Missions in Somalia have depended heavily on the European Union and UN assessed contributions. That reliance gives external donors more say over when and how African forces move, undercutting the sovereignty argument at the heart of the ASF.

Political will is a quieter problem. Standby rosters look good at summits, but governments hesitate when asked to send soldiers into a neighbour’s crisis. Disputes over command and slow regional responses in South Sudan and the Great Lakes show that unity at the African Union level does not always survive contact with a specific conflict.

The Institute for Security Studies has long tracked this gap between ambition and readiness. Its analysts have asked whether the ASF should be rethought rather than endlessly re-launched, noting that repeated deadlines have passed without the force being used.

South Africa’s place in the machinery

For South Africa, the ASF is not a distant AU project. The 2015 exercise at Lohatla put the country at the centre of testing the force. South African troops served in SAMIM in Mozambique, facing an insurgency that disrupted gas projects and displaced hundreds of thousands of people across the border. The ASF’s Southern African arrangements are built largely around the same SADC members South Africa already works with through joint training and existing deployments.

But South Africa’s own defence challenges sit awkwardly alongside ASF ambitions. The South African National Defence Force has faced budget cuts and persistent questions about the readiness of its own units. A country that struggles to keep its domestic military at full strength will find it hard to keep a standby pledge credible. That is not a uniquely South African problem. It is a continental one the ASF’s design never solved.

The unfinished test

Resolution 2719 gives the ASF its clearest recent opening. The UN Security Council’s willingness to consider assessed contributions for African Union missions could, over time, reduce the funding scramble that has defined every major African deployment. The AU must first show that it has the compliance, human rights and financial accountability systems to handle that money. Those talks are still running.

Money alone will not answer the question Amani Africa II posed in 2015. The soldiers at Lohatla could coordinate on a training ground. The unresolved part is whether the political machinery in Addis Ababa, Abuja, Gaborone and Pretoria will authorise them to move when a real crisis breaks.

The African Standby Force at twenty is best understood as an insurance policy that has never been claimed. The policy is real: frameworks, rosters, exercises and regional relationships. The claim would require the kind of rapid, unified decision African states have rarely managed at the moment they needed it most. That gap, not the number of years, is the measure that matters.

Photo by National Library of Scotland on Unsplash