Daily Inspiration Quote by Lakhdar Brahimi

Brahimi is pushing back on a comforting fiction: that today’s wars are neatly “internal,” sealed off inside borders, and therefore somebody else’s problem. His phrasing does two jobs at once. First, it diagnoses language as policy. “There is an expression now” sounds almost bored, the way a seasoned negotiator signals he’s heard the euphemism in every capital and every briefing. Calling them “so-called internal conflicts” is a polite diplomatic scalpel: he’s not just disputing a term, he’s accusing it of misdirection.

The subtext is accountability. If a conflict is “internal,” outside powers can posture as neutral bystanders or mere humanitarians. If it has “connections to the outside world,” then money, weapons, mercenaries, sanctions, propaganda, and patronage networks become part of the causal chain. Brahimi’s insistence that they are “not really internal” is an argument against the moral loophole embedded in sovereignty talk: the idea that outsiders can meddle and then shrug when the violence metastasizes.

Context matters because Brahimi’s career sits inside the post-Cold War era of “civil wars” that were rarely civil in the simple sense: Algeria’s own turmoil, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya. He’s speaking from the vantage point of someone who has watched conflict labels travel faster than facts. The line reads like a warning to policymakers and publics alike: stop treating fragmentation as local pathology when it’s often the downstream effect of global interests colliding on a smaller stage.