What Distance Allows Us to Forget: The Geography of Indifference
By Lia Moskov
Does distance make people less responsible for the harm they cause, or does it just make that responsibility easier to ignore?
As a norm, distance is understood geographically as the physical space between people, countries or conflicts. However, within international politics distance can also fall on the bureaucratic or emotional side. Governments can conduct warfare remotely by placing asylum seekers beyond their borders and depend on supply chains that separate consumers from the workers producing their goods. In each case, the consequences of political decisions remain tangible, though experienced miles away from the people who authorise and benefit from them. It can be argued that distance does not reduce harm, but reduces the pressure to acknowledge it.
This dilemma is partly rooted in human nature. People generally respond more intensely to the suffering of one identifiable individual than to the suffering of a large and unfamiliar population. When a person is crying in front of us it produces an immediate sense of responsibility, whilst thousands of deaths presented through statistics can feel politically significant but emotionally remote. We like to throw around the claim that every human life holds equal value, but most of the time our reactions are shaped by familiarity and resemblance, both results of proximity. The further suffering moves from our own experience, the easier it becomes to treat it as an event rather than something happening to individual people.
Distance originates long before borders or battlefields, sometimes it is simply the space between you and someone you no longer have to look at, someone who is no longer in front of you. Once they are gone, it becomes easy to revise what happened: to remember your words as less cruel, your silence as necessary, or their reaction as excessive. You may begin to believe that because the moment has passed for you, it must have passed for them too. But not having to witness the damage is not the same as having done none.
This same behaviour is reproduced institutionally by states and on a much greater scale. Political systems frequently create layers between decisions and their human consequences. Responsibility is divided between government departments, international organisations, and administrative procedures until there isn't any single actor to be held fully accountable. Harm is not necessarily hidden, it just becomes complex and is made distant enough to become politically manageable.
This effect is only catalysed by the language used by institutions, contributing to the separation. Civilian deaths become “collateral damage”, forced removal becomes “relocation”, and the years spent waiting for asylum decisions become known as “processing”. These terms may have technical or legal purposes, yes, but they also replace the individual experience of fear, loss, and uncertainty that come with these categories, making them easier to be digested and discussed by governments and the public. Political language does not inherently deny suffering, sometimes it simply makes that suffering less human.
Remote warfare demonstrates this political distance particularly clearly. Modern military operations can be authorised and conducted from locations far removed from the communities who are left experiencing them. The individual on the ground is increasingly represented through intelligence reports and surveillance images. This may make operations more technically controlled, but it also changes the relationship between the action and its consequence. When violence is experienced mainly through data, it becomes possible to observe a person without meaningfully encountering them. Yet, distance is not only created through technology. Governments can also create it geographically, placing the people affected by their decisions beyond the borders and public spaces in which those decisions are made.
An especially clear example of this is Australia’s offshore asylum-processing policy in Nauru. From 2013, people attempting to reach Australia by boat were transferred to processing facilities in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, with more than 3,000 refugees and asylum seekers sent offshore within the following six years. The policy was publicly justified as a means of protecting borders and discouraging dangerous journeys, but it also created a significant physical separation between the Australian public and the people affected by decisions made in Australia.
This distance was politically useful. The people held on Nauru were located away from the Australian mainland, detached from its communities and most of its public life. Their experiences could therefore be discussed primarily through the language of border security and “regional processing” rather than actual direct encounters with the individuals living under the policy. The asylum seeker became a question on national control before they were understood as a person.
Offshore processing also complicated the generic idea of responsibility. Australia could argue that individuals were being held within another sovereign state, whilst Nauru operated under arrangements that were funded and established with substantial Australian involvement. This division is what created the appearance that responsibility existed somewhere between the two governments rather than clearly resting with either. However, in January of 2015, the UN Human Rights Committee concluded that the responsibility lay with Australia for the arbitrary detention of people it had transferred to Nauru. Australia’s own Department of Home Affairs continued to describe its regional-processing and resettlement arrangements in an official update published in June 2026.
The importance of Nauru to this argument isn't just that it moved people geographically, but it also moved the consequences of Australian policy beyond the immediate political environment in which that policy was supported. The suffering did not disappear when it crossed the sea; it just became less visible to the electorate in whose name the system was operating.
This demonstrates how distance can change the politics of responsibility. When the affected individuals are close by, they can enter schools, hospitals, courts, and public debate. When they are being held thousands of kilometers away, they are more easily represented as an abstract population to be managed. Offshore processing therefore controls more than migration, it controls the proximity between a decision and the people required to live with it.
Nauru is an especially visible example, but the same separation appears across modern political life. Remote warfare divides those authorising force from those left experiencing it, whilst global supply chains separate consumers from the labour conditions supporting their consumption. In each case, distance does not remove responsibility, but rather it distributes it enough that the accountability becomes easier to resist.
However, it would be unrealistic to argue that individuals should respond emotionally to every instance of suffering across the world. Human beings cannot process every conflict, death, or injustice with the same intensity as something taking place directly in their own lives. Therefore in some cases, distance can be psychologically necessary. The political problem begins when governments, institutions, and corporations begin to consciously rely on this limitation. There is a difference between accepting that human compassion has boundaries and creating systems that place suffering beyond those boundaries. Political responsibility cannot depend entirely on whether a victim is visible, familiar or emotionally compelling. This is precisely why human rights and international legislations have been put in place: they attempt to transform inconsistent compassion into a consistent obligation.
Ultimately, distance is politically useful because it separates those who make decisions from those who live with their consequences. It allows governments to present violence as a strategic move and displacement as something administrative. Exploitation becomes an unfortunate consequence of an otherwise efficient economy. The issue is not simply that people fail to care about what happens far away, it is that political systems have learned how to use that failure.
Distance may determine what we live and see, but it should not determine what we are responsible for.
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