This paper examines how North African states respond to ongoing challenges to the foundational norms underpinning the post-1945 international order and its secondary institutions. Rather than assuming either passive alignment or outright revisionism, we analyse the interplay between pressures that erode core principles or institutions (sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-intervention, and multilateralism) and patterns of differentiated norm adherence across regional and global arenas.

Empirically, the paper focuses on a set of salient episodes since late 2025 that have strained the institutions that play a constitutive, regulative and procedural role in international order, including controversies surrounding territorial integrity (e.g. external positions on Somaliland and proposals affecting Greenland), the use of force and non-intervention (e.g. US or Israeli actions in Venezuela, Iran, and Lebanon), and the procedural legitimacy of multilateral governance in the context of Gaza and initiatives that sideline the United Nations, such as the Board of Peace. These cases are used as entry points to analyse official positions and justificatory narratives in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Mauritania.

The analysis seeks to identify patterns of convergence and divergence, and to explain them through a combination of strategic, normative, and identity-based factors, e.g. national security, alliances, economic dependence, normative compliance, and historical legacies. We argue that North African responses reveal neither a coherent defence of the existing international order nor a clear endorsement of its dismantling, but rather a pragmatic, case-by-case repositioning that simultaneously reproduces regional amity/enmity patterns, contributes to exacerbate regional conflict dynamics, and weakens cooperation-based regional institutions.