SADC, Rwanda, and the AU: Competing Models of Intervention in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado

The insurgency in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province has become a critical test case for Africa’s evolving security architecture. Since 2017, escalating violence by armed groups has drawn diverse external responses, most prominently the SADC regional mission (SAMIM), Rwanda’s bilateral military intervention, and the African Union’s political endorsement. These responses illustrate the increasingly complex and multi-layered nature of African peace and security governance. This article analyzes Cabo Delgado through the dual lenses of regime complexity and convergence. Africa’s peace and security architecture functions as a regime complex: a patchwork of overlapping continental, regional, bilateral, and external mechanisms that interact without a single hierarchical authority. Within this context, convergence is the mechanism that enables a decentralized system to operate effectively, allowing diverse actors with distinct mandates and resources to achieve partial coherence and complementarity. Applying this framework, the article examines the extent to which interventions in Cabo Delgado align in strategy and implementation, and what factors facilitate or hinder such coordination, thereby contributing to broader debates on Africa’s security governance and hybrid interventions in fragile conflict settings.