Leadership Quote by Paddy Ashdown

The line has the gentle cadence of compassion, but its real work is political triage: stabilize people where they are, because movement is expensive, destabilizing, and contagious. Ashdown isn’t just talking about farmers and “proper prices.” He’s sketching a theory of peacekeeping and state-building in plain clothes: if the local economy collapses, the social order collapses with it, and then you’re no longer managing livelihoods - you’re managing unrest, displacement, and a vacuum that armed actors can fill.

The intent is pragmatic and preventative. “Make their livelihoods viable” frames dignity as infrastructure, not sentiment. “Proper prices” signals a corrective to warped markets - the kind produced by war economies, corruption, or international interventions that flood regions with aid while undercutting local producers. The verbs matter: “get them,” “try,” “make them stay.” It’s managerial language, revealing a power relationship where staying put is an outcome to be engineered, not merely a choice to be respected.

The subtext is the anxiety of exit. “Rather than sell their property and leave again” implies a cycle of return and flight: people come back after conflict, test the ground, then depart when survival looks impossible. Property becomes both anchor and escape hatch; selling it is a vote of no confidence in the future. Ashdown, a veteran of Balkan-era international politics, is also addressing the unglamorous truth of post-conflict recovery: security isn’t just soldiers and elections. It’s the price of milk, the reliability of roads, the credibility of tomorrow.