Justice & Law Quote by Richard Leakey

“Anarchy reigns” is the kind of phrase that sounds like a newspaper alarm bell, and Leakey uses it deliberately: not to sensationalize, but to strip away the comforting fiction that the state is present everywhere within its own map. By pairing that sweeping diagnosis with a concrete operational detail - “the police and military have retreated quite some distance” - he turns chaos into geography. Authority isn’t merely weakened; it has physically pulled back, leaving a vacuum where rules, markets, and safety usually sit.

The border references matter. Ethiopia and Somalia aren’t just neighboring countries; in East African political imagination they’re shorthand for porous frontiers, contested identity, and long-running conflict economies. Leakey is signaling that insecurity is not evenly distributed. It concentrates at edges where jurisdiction blurs and where armed groups, smugglers, and opportunistic local power brokers can outcompete a fatigued central government.

As an environmentalist, Leakey’s subtext is also ecological: conservation depends on governance. When security forces retreat, parks become open territory for poaching, charcoal trafficking, illegal grazing, and the quiet monetization of “unprotected” land. The line reads like a field report, but it’s really an indictment - of state fragility, of the way borders turn into abandonment zones, and of how quickly environmental stewardship collapses when the monopoly on force dissolves. Leakey isn’t describing disorder for its own sake; he’s mapping the conditions under which both human and natural systems get stripped for parts.