War & Peace Quote by Ahmed Ben Bella

“Obvious” is doing quiet, strategic work here. Ben Bella isn’t confessing uncertainty; he’s pre-loading the public with patience, framing inevitable hardship as self-evident rather than politically produced. The line comes out of a revolutionary moment when Algeria’s liberation struggle had to turn into a functioning state, and the most dangerous pivot wasn’t military but institutional: replacing clandestine networks, wartime loyalties, and emergency logic with courts, rules, and predictable authority.

The phrase “lawful state” is a deliberate contrast to “state of war,” but it’s also a bid for legitimacy in two directions at once. Domestically, it reassures exhausted citizens that violence isn’t the permanent grammar of politics. Internationally, it signals to skeptical governments that the new regime wants to be read as a state, not a militia with a flag. Yet the subtext is more complicated: “lawful” can mean rights and restraint, or it can mean centralized control. In postcolonial transitions, law is often the instrument that consolidates power, not simply the safeguard that limits it. Ben Bella’s wording leaves that ambiguity intact.

“Won’t be easy” is a warning disguised as realism. It asks for moral credit in advance for compromises: amnesties, crackdowns on rival factions, economic austerity, or the sidelining of pluralism in the name of stability. The sentence is less a forecast than a permission slip, setting expectations so the messiness of building “law” can be narrated as necessary growing pains rather than contested political choices.