Justice & Law Quote by Gijs de Vries

Terrorism doesn’t thrive in a vacuum; it thrives in a mess. Gijs de Vries’s line is built to sound like a calm diagnostic, but its real work is political triage: shift attention from the spectacular moment of attack to the slow, structural conditions that make attacks possible. The sentence stacks crises like dominoes - military conflict, civil strife, lawlessness, bad governance, human rights violations - and then delivers the practical payoff: these conditions lower the “cost” of operating for violent groups. “Easier to hide, train and prepare” is the language of logistics, not ideology, implying that counterterrorism is as much about governance as it is about guns.

The subtext is a warning against narrow, reactionary policy. By placing “human rights violations” in the same causal chain as “lawlessness” and “bad governance,” de Vries is quietly rebuking states that treat rights as a luxury during security crackdowns. Repression, he suggests, is not merely immoral; it is operationally stupid. That’s a strategically chosen framing for a European politician associated with post-9/11 security debates, when governments were expanding surveillance and detention powers while also trying to stabilize fragile regions abroad.

It also smuggles in a doctrine of responsibility. If terrorist networks exploit failed or abusive systems, then “security” becomes inseparable from state capacity, legitimacy, and restraint. The line reads like policy realism, but it’s also an argument for a broader mandate: counterterrorism as governance reform, conflict prevention, and rights protection, not just border controls and raids.