For decades, regional integration has been guided by a dominant linear logic. Governments negotiate agreements, establish supranational institutions, harmonize regulations, reduce tariffs, and economic integration will automatically follow. This hierarchical, top-down logic has shaped integration efforts around the world, from customs unions to common markets. It also underpins much of the thinking surrounding the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), widely celebrated as the most ambitious trade agreement ever undertaken on the continent. But what if this sequence does not reflect how integration actually happens in Africa? Read more on Eurasia Review.

Historically, regional integration processes have followed a linear hierarchical logic: create supranational institutions, sign trade agreements, remove tariffs… and then integration will happen. This article argues that this logic does not apply to Africa. Hystory has proven that African nations do not integrate because they sign agreements. They integrate because they produce together. The AfCFTA remains an extraordinary political achievement. But political integration alone cannot create industrial integration. Factories do. Supply chains do. Joint industrial projects do. The paper advances therefore a different way of thinking about African integration. Instead of asking: « How do we implement the AfCFTA? » we should ask: “What productive projects will make the AfCFTA inevitable?” This leads to what we call Project-centered model of African integration.  Continental integration should not be understood as a process that cascades from the African Union to the RECs and then to Member States. Rather, it emerges from successful regional integration initiatives that are later scaled up and coordinated at the continental level. Starting by connecting factories, farmers, logistics providers and manufacturers across neighboring countries: one regional value chain at a time. Because production creates interdependence. And interdependence creates integration. The policy implication is that African integration follows an emergent rather than hierarchical logic. Continental governance succeeds when it institutionalizes successful regional capabilities instead of attempting to create them through continental mandates.