Politics & Power Quote by Félix Houphouët-Boigny

War is framed here not as a regrettable necessity but as the lone moral enemy, a simplification that’s doing heavy political work. Houphouet-Boigny’s pairing of “only one object” and “only one obsession” is rhetorical discipline: it narrows the field of legitimate passions to two absolutes, hatred and peace, then flips the expected script by making hatred serve pacifism. The line is designed to sound uncontestable, a kind of civic vow that pre-empts factional squabbles by insisting there is just one acceptable target for anger.

The real craft is in the layering of “peace”. He doesn’t settle for the diplomatic version. “Peace of hearts” makes the project intimate, psychological, even spiritual; “social peace” brings it back down to labor, class, and the everyday frictions that can turn governance brittle; “peace between the Nations” scales the idea to geopolitics. It’s a three-tier architecture of stability, implying that treaties are meaningless if resentment is left to ferment at home, and that domestic order is fragile if the regional neighborhood is burning.

Context matters: Houphouet-Boigny governed Cote d’Ivoire through decolonization’s aftershocks and a Cold War Africa where coups and proxy conflicts were constant temptations. The subtext is legitimacy through calm. Peace becomes both principle and governing strategy: an argument for gradualism, for centralized authority presented as protection, and for positioning the nation as a stable partner in a volatile era. It’s idealism with an administrator’s edge: peace not as a dream, but as infrastructure.