Success Quote by Lakhdar Brahimi

Brahimi is doing something diplomats rarely do in public: he’s assigning blame without naming names. “Failed state” is already a loaded label, often deployed by outside powers to justify intervention, lectures, or “capacity-building” programs that conveniently align with geopolitical interests. By insisting failure is “the responsibility of the people who have made that state fail,” he tries to drag the conversation back from abstract diagnosis to human agency. States don’t “fail” like batteries; they’re sabotaged, hollowed out, or captured.

The sting is in the next clause: “generally the people of that country.” On its face, it reads like a rebuke to the easy habit of blaming colonial borders, sanctions, foreign meddling, or international institutions. The subtext is harder: he’s narrowing culpability to domestic elites while leaving the door open to the public’s complicity, whether through passivity, patronage politics, or acceptance of corruption as the price of stability. That “generally” does a lot of quiet work, acknowledging external pressures without letting them become an all-purpose alibi.

Context matters because Brahimi spent his career in the UN ecosystem that’s constantly accused of either enabling strongmen or arriving too late with technocratic fixes. This line functions as both self-defense and warning. It pushes back against the moral outsourcing that lets leaders portray every crisis as something done to them, while also telling international audiences: don’t flatter yourselves into thinking you can manufacture legitimacy from the outside. The intent is accountability, delivered in the careful, sharp-edged language of someone who has watched excuses become policy.