Daily Inspiration Quote by Jan Egeland

The real target here isn’t Somalia’s warlords or even the mechanics of state collapse; it’s the audience’s shrug. Egeland frames “the biggest challenge” as a story we tell ourselves: Somalia as “hopeless,” “incomprehensible,” and therefore safely ignorable. That triad matters. “Hopeless” shuts down moral urgency, “incomprehensible” flatters outsiders into thinking complexity is an alibi, and “nothing we can do” turns policy failure into a law of nature. The sentence is built like an intervention for donor fatigue.

As a public servant steeped in humanitarian crises, Egeland’s intent is tactical: to reclassify Somalia from an unsolvable nightmare to a solvable political and human problem that requires sustained attention. The subtext is an indictment of international habits - short timelines, media-driven empathy, and a preference for clean narratives. When conflicts don’t map neatly onto “good guys vs. bad guys,” the outside world often decides the locals are irrational and the situation is beyond help. Egeland is calling that what it is: a choice.

Contextually, Somalia has long been treated as the archetype of “failed state” discourse, especially after the early-1990s intervention and its backlash, which chilled Western appetite for engagement. Egeland is pushing against that trauma and the lazy fatalism it produced. The line works because it reverses the problem: the obstacle isn’t just Somalia’s fragmentation; it’s the international community’s desire for a permission slip to look away.