War & Peace Quote by Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s line is bureaucratic rhetoric with a grim punchline: peacekeeping became impossible the moment peace stopped being a premise. The repetition of “peace” isn’t clumsy; it’s diagnostic. He’s using the word the way institutions use mandates - as a legal and moral switch. If the mission is called “peacekeeping,” then someone, somewhere, must be keeping something that already exists. Somalia exposed the fraud in that comforting label.

The context is the early 1990s, when post-Cold War optimism met state collapse. Somalia wasn’t a dispute between recognizable parties ready to sign papers; it was a shattered political landscape where aid deliveries required coercion, and coercion quickly became its own story. When he says “we discovered,” he’s quietly shifting blame from planners to reality itself, as if the UN stumbled into an ontological problem rather than a strategic one. That’s classic institutional self-protection: admit the mismatch, but frame it as a revelation, not a failure.

The subtext is a warning about mission creep without ever saying the phrase. If there is no peace, peacekeeping turns into peacemaking, policing, counterinsurgency - roles the UN is structurally ill-designed to perform and politically unequipped to sustain. Somalia becomes the inflection point where humanitarian intent collides with armed force, and the world learns that good intentions don’t create consent. His sentence circles itself because the UN was circling the same dilemma: legitimacy depends on peace, but peace may depend on power the UN doesn’t truly have.