In 2019, the former United Nations special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer wrote that “without any doubt, the torture and abuse suffered by millions of migrants in all parts of the world is one of the greatest tragedies of our time.”Footnote 1 Having published a report the year before on the torture and ill treatment of migrants and refugees,Footnote 2 the special rapporteur drew a connection to how this torture was not only the result of deterrence-based migration policies but also due to indifference to migrant and refugee suffering. Writing an opinion piece for Human Rights Day in 2018, the special rapporteur condemned the torture of people on the move, arguing that “the worst cruelty of all” has been “our own indifference.”Footnote 3 The rapporteur stated:
We know these people are exploited by smugglers, traffickers and corrupt officials, we know they are being tortured, raped, enslaved, and butchered for their organs. We know they have nowhere else to go. And yet, no one feels responsible. Instead, we erect physical and mental barriers, we think and speak of hostile invasion and send the military to defend our borders.Footnote 4
The special rapporteur is not alone in pointing out the indifference shown to migrants and refugees. Pope Francis condemned what he called a “globalized indifference” to migrant and refugee suffering in his homily delivered on the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2013.Footnote 5 United Nations human rights commissioners have denounced Europe’s “lethal disregard,”Footnote 6 “indifference,” and “nonchalance”Footnote 7 to migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea, while the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner criticized Europe’s “tolerance” for human rights violations against people on the move.Footnote 8
How can this treatment toward migrants and refugeesFootnote 9 be explained? Understanding the psychology of individual policymakers and government officials can offer important insights into why the empathy of some individuals has been blunted. However, it can also fall short by not considering the role that policymaking processes can play in generating indifference. This article argues that cooperative deterrence policies that states have adopted over the last several decades have been a key factor in contributing to the indifference toward migrant and refugee suffering. Migration deterrence practices such as physical barriers, visa restrictions, and pushbacks at borders are increasingly being complemented with more cooperative-based deterrence policies whereby states in the Global North and South cooperate to prevent people from arriving irregularlyFootnote 10 at destination countries. Cooperative agreements have included pushing and pulling people backFootnote 11 at land borders and at sea, funding neighboring states to prevent arrivals from reaching destination countries, outsourcing detention, and imposing sanctions on nonstate actors, such as airlines, to prevent people from boarding airplanes without valid documentation.Footnote 12
Although states have a legitimate right to cooperate with others and secure state borders,Footnote 13 cooperative deterrence arrangements have produced psychosocial dynamics that can generate indifference to migrant and refugee suffering. In this case, “psychosocial dynamics” refer to the reflexive interaction between individual psychological states and the social forces in the policymaking process that can strengthen or weaken moral restraints against harming others. States have structured cooperative arrangements in ways that authorize and routinize harmful policies, help actors evade responsibility, and dehumanize migrants and refugees by creating physical and psychological distance between governments, policymakers, and migrants and refugees.Footnote 14 These social processes are used by governments to obscure the moral implications of their policies from domestic and international audiences, which helps legitimize them in the face of serious human rights violations. At the same time, governments also utilize these social processes to help remove moral restraints and contemplation from the policymaking process itself. Cooperative deterrence arrangements blunt moral dilemmas that result from harming others and disconnect policymakers from the consequences of their actions. This creates “mental barriers”Footnote 15 and “blind spots,”Footnote 16 enabling policymakers and political leaders to distance themselves from, and deny involvement in, migrant and refugee suffering.
Focusing on the psychosocial dynamics of migration deterrence sheds new light on the dark side of international cooperation.Footnote 17 International cooperation is, of course, crucial in sharing responsibility to assist and protect the displaced. It is embedded within the UN Charter, and other international instruments, and has a moral and legal foundation under international law.Footnote 18 However, international cooperation, as well as international law, can also have distributive effects that generate inequalities that advantage some actors and discriminate against others.Footnote 19 In such cases, policy processes can inhibit moral deliberation and generate indifference among policymakers and political leaders. Existing literature has shown how migration deterrence policies have made migration journeys more dangerous,Footnote 20 and contributed to the criminalization,Footnote 21 securitization,Footnote 22 and evasion of legal liability through the strategic use of law.Footnote 23 This article builds upon this work by demonstrating the importance of incorporating psychosocial dynamics and indifference into the analysis of international norms, rules, and governance structures.Footnote 24 Understanding these psychosocial dynamics is crucial not only to challenge the harmful treatment of migrants and refugees but also to develop international cooperation that strengthens, rather than undermines, international human rights.
This article is divided into five sections. The first and second sections examine cooperative deterrence in international society and how these policies are generating harm. The third section defines what is meant by indifference before turning to the fourth section, which explores the social processes within cooperative arrangements that help generate indifference. The fifth section makes the case for reforming migration policies so that they are consistent with international human rights and enable greater opportunity for moral reflection.
Cooperating on Migration Deterrence
Cooperative deterrence occurs worldwide and is used by states as an integral strategy to prevent people irregularly arriving at destination countries.Footnote 25 In North America, for example, there is cooperation between the United States and Canada,Footnote 26 the United States and Mexico,Footnote 27 and the United States and other Central American countries.Footnote 28 In Europe, there are cooperative deterrence arrangements between the United Kingdom and France to try and stop people crossing the English Channel,Footnote 29 as well as between countries on the European continent to push back irregular arrivals.Footnote 30 Cooperative arrangements have been made between the European Union, EU member states, and neighboring countries. These include those between TurkeyFootnote 31 and North African countries such as LibyaFootnote 32 and Tunisia,Footnote 33 among others, to intercept and prevent people from traveling to Europe. Australia has also developed forms of cooperative deterrence with neighboring countries in Southeast Asia, such as Indonesia and the Pacific Island nations of Papua New Guinea and Nauru.Footnote 34
Although these policies are employed by countries in both the Global North and Global South, they have been pushed most heavily by wealthy democracies, including the United States, Canada, European states, and Australia.Footnote 35 Cooperation has included signing memorandums of understanding (MOUs), readmission agreements, and designating countries “safe,” which enable countries to facilitate deportations without appropriate individualized risk assessments, potentially exposing the deported individuals to the risk of harm.Footnote 36 Countries fund partner states to host detention facilities and implement deterrence policies, share information and intelligence, and host foreign liaison officers from partner countries to intercept people without adequate documentation. Countries also utilize nonstate actors to enforce deterrence policies. This includes countries imposing sanctions on airlines if they allow people to board planes without valid visas and cooperating with private security companies to manage immigration detention facilities. Visa restrictions, physical barricades and fences, exclusion of access to asylum from parts of a country’s jurisdiction, and pushbacks at borders are other forms of cooperation that aim to restrict irregular arrivals and exert control over borders.Footnote 37
These policies have led to serious adverse effects for migrants and refugees. They have forced people to travel along more dangerous routesFootnote 38 and contributed to human rights violations, such as torture, slavery, sexual violence, inhumane detention, and unlawful killings.Footnote 39 The former UN special rapporteur on torture identified this link between human rights abuses and migration policy, arguing that “the primary cause for the massive abuse suffered by migrants worldwide . . . [is] the growing tendency of states to base their official migration policies and practices on deterrence, criminalization and discrimination rather than on protection and human rights.”Footnote 40 Migrants and refugees have also been detained arbitrarily and inhumanely, denied access to asylum,Footnote 41 discriminated against based on their mode of arrival,Footnote 42 and returned into harm’s way in breach of the “nonrefoulement principle” via pushbacks or pullbacks, readmission agreements, or diplomatic assurances.Footnote 43
However, states are not ignoring international law when implementing cooperative deterrence policies. Rather, as James C. Hathaway and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen argue, cooperative deterrence policies reflect a “schizophrenic attitude” to international law whereby states are strategically interpreting international law to abide by the letter of the law but undermine its spirit.Footnote 44 Known as “legal evasion,”Footnote 45 this strategy has allowed states to claim they are upholding international law, while at the same time, minimizing their obligations and evading legal liability for wrongdoing.Footnote 46
Cooperative Deterrence and Human Suffering
The consequences of these policies go beyond implications for legal accountability. What has not been adequately explored is how these policies are maintained in the face of so much harm. Countries have continued to implement, legitimize, and promote cooperative deterrence arrangements even though they result in significant human rights abuses. In 2017 for example, Italy, with EU support, signed an agreement with Libya to prevent migrants from reaching Europe.Footnote 47 Europe provides Libya with information, intelligence, funding, and material resources, such as vessels, to intercept migrant boats and pull them back to Libya. Even though the European Court of Human Rights already ruled in 2012 that Libya was not safe for migrants because of the risk of torture,Footnote 48 the EU and Italy have continued to cooperate with Libya to return people there, with Italy renewing its agreement with Libya in 2023.Footnote 49 This is despite migrants and refugees experiencing, in addition to torture, inhumane detention, slavery, sexual violence, and crimes against humanity while in Libya.Footnote 50
A similar lack of concern for human rights has been seen in other cooperative arrangements as well. When Australia signed MOUs with Nauru and Papua New Guinea to host Australian immigration detention centers in 2012, significant human rights issues were documented soon after.Footnote 51 Human rights groups, the UN, medical organizations, and lawyers all documented inhumane detention and treatment, torture, serious psychological harm, suicides, and sexual abuse.Footnote 52 And yet, even with this evidence being widely available, the Australian government continued to promote its offshore detention policies as effective, necessary, and humane, as they save lives by preventing people from dying at sea.Footnote 53
The United States also has a history of cooperating with partner countries to deter migrants and refugees despite serious human rights consequences. President Reagan cooperated with Haiti’s government under an MOU signed in 1981 to push back Haitian vessels, even though there was evidence that Haiti was not a safe place and serious human rights violations were occurring there.Footnote 54 The United States and Mexico have also been cooperating for decades on migration and anti–drug trafficking operations.Footnote 55 During the first Trump administration, the United States and Mexico cooperated in forcing people applying for asylum in the United States to remain in Mexico while they awaited asylum interviews. This forced asylum seekers to wait in unsafe Mexican border towns, leading to cases of physical violence, rape, extortion, and abuse.Footnote 56 Although the Biden administration ceased this policy in 2022 after numerous legal battles that went all the way to the Supreme Court, in 2023, it implemented a new policy that required people to continue to stay in Mexico and wait to be called for asylum interviews, exposing them to the same unsafe and dangerous conditions.Footnote 57 When President Trump returned to office in 2025, he reinstated the “Remain in Mexico” policy, arguing that it was “successful,” but ignoring the human rights consequences of the policy.Footnote 58
The effects of these policies are evident to such an extent that governments knew, or should have known, that people were being harmed by these deterrence policies. How do governments such as those of the United States, Australia, Italy, and others that promote themselves as human rights–abiding actors at the same time promote migration policies that result in so much suffering? And do these examples show indifference to suffering? Cooperative deterrence policies should be understood within a context of colonial state violence,Footnote 59 racism by destination countries against people from the Global South,Footnote 60 and the securitization and criminalization of migrants and refugees.Footnote 61 The racist and dehumanizing rhetoric toward migrants and refugees from the Trump administrationFootnote 62 and some governments in Europe,Footnote 63 as well as the anti-migrant sentiment of some domestic populations,Footnote 64 show that hostility toward people on the move is common as well. Since taking office in 2025, President Trump has demonized migrants and refugees as “criminals” and ignored nonrefoulement protections as he closes the border to asylum seekers.Footnote 65
Although hostility plays a role in the treatment of migrants and refugees, it would be misplaced to argue that it is the key driving force behind such policies. Social psychologists, historians, and philosophers have shown that ordinary people can engage in brutal violence against others without hating them.Footnote 66 Hostility is expressed by some governments but not all and evidence suggests that other factors are at play in explaining such treatment. The shift to harder border policies in Europe, for example, is often in response to domestic political pressures as governments try to block far-right parties on immigration issues.Footnote 67 Moreover, international refugee and human rights are not being completely ignored. Governments go to great lengths to redefine international law to argue that they are in fact upholding their humanitarian and legal obligations to people on the move.Footnote 68 Making efforts to appear to be respecting international legal and humanitarian obligations and to “care”Footnote 69 for migrants and refugees is not something that would be expected, or needed, if hostility guided deterrence policies.
There are other mechanisms besides hostility that can blunt empathy and remove migrants from the moral vision of those in destination countries. What needs to be examined are the social processes within cooperative deterrence policies that help to justify and remove responsibility for harm, weaken moral considerations, and place migrants and refugees out of mind and out of sight. Not only do these social processes make it easier for states to turn their backs on the suffering of strangers by generating indifference but they also enable the psychosocial strategies that allow people to harm others without adverse psychological consequences.
The Psychosocial Dynamics of Harm and Indifference
Understanding indifference and how it comes about is crucial for helping to strengthen international human rights and legal frameworks. Despite human rights groups showing that indifference is contributing to human rights violations, such as torture,Footnote 70 and historians showing that indifference played an important role in enabling the Holocaust to occur,Footnote 71 the concept of “indifference” has received very little attention within political theory.Footnote 72 Defined as a “lack of interest in someone or something,”Footnote 73 Hallvard Lillehammer argues that indifference can occur for many different reasons. One reason is because people can be apathetic: they simply cannot be bothered to take an interest in something of ethical significance or they have been harmed by the world in some way such that they become indifferent to the world as a coping mechanism.Footnote 74
Other forms of indifference, however, have a purpose. Someone can show indifference to the suffering of another because they are interested in achieving a goal—such as deterring irregular arrivals—and ignore the harmful consequences of pursuing that goal. The bureaucrat that can harm others from the comfort of their office by issuing orders would be an example of this “blinkered” type of indifference.Footnote 75 Indifference can also be shown toward an individual or group to mark and exclude them as an outgroup in what Lillehammer calls “exclusionary indifference.”Footnote 76 For example, migrants and refugees that arrive through authorized pathways may be accepted, while those that arrive irregularly are not. The indifference to the latter serves to mark worthy from unworthy migrants and refugees by sending a signal that the destination country will not support, or concern itself with the suffering of, those who take irregular routes. And finally, Lillehammer argues that indifference can also occur because of how a subject has been dehumanized based on their intrinsic qualities.Footnote 77 They are deemed to lack ethical significance simply because of their membership in an ascriptive group, such as the color of one’s skin or because of the country they were born in.Footnote 78 These forms of indifference can operate simultaneously and are often difficult to distinguish.Footnote 79 However, the outcome is still the same. Indifference rejects humanity,Footnote 80 weakens social bonds, and narrows the moral community.
If there are many different types of indifference, the pressing question becomes how this indifference comes about. The common assumption about why people harm others—whether by acting or failing to act through indifference—is that it is the result of psychological or character traits of those individuals. However, social psychology has shown how the social environment is important in shaping human behavior. This includes how social processes can weaken moral restraints and moral contemplation and enable people to harm others and continue “to live with themselves.”Footnote 81 Focusing on individual psychology falls short in explaining why, for example, so many different people are willing to follow orders to massacre others in wartime, or why so many people were indifferent to the suffering of Jewish people under the Nazis. Broader social forces, not individual psychology, need to be identified to understand not only the infliction of harmFootnote 82 but the indifference to suffering.
Cooperative deterrence policies are producing a policy environment that is contributing to the indifference of people in receiving countries toward people on the move by undermining social bonds, reducing opportunities for moral reflection, and placing people beyond moral concern. Drawing upon the work of Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton,Footnote 83 I argue that cooperative deterrence enables the authorization and routinization of harmful policies and the evasion of responsibility for wrongdoing, as well as the dehumanization of migrants and refugees. “Authorization” occurs when an environment enables harmful conduct by authorizing or condoning that behavior. Through cooperative deterrence arrangements, governments create a policy environment that enables them to justify, deny, legitimize, or condone the human rights violations of migrants and refugees. “Routinization” facilitates moral detachment from the consequences of one’s actions by displacing responsibility and automizing policy, such as pushbacks, deportations, and detention, to reduce the need for moral reflection. “Evading responsibility” helps individuals feel that they are not liable for the harm being committed because responsibility is displaced onto others, diffused among many people, or eliminated entirely. And “dehumanization” results in a category of subhumans or abstract figures that are removed from the moral community of those implementing policy processes.Footnote 84 Dehumanization occurs not only through psychological distance but also through physical distance, as cooperative deterrence pushes migrants and refugees out of sight from government officials and policymakers, making people on the move easier to harm.
These social processes are crucial in helping actors disengage from moral principles. When an actor violates norms and values that are part of their identity, it can generate adverse psychological effects, as actors may become unable to psychologically cope knowing that they have harmed others. People can feel guilt and self-contempt when violating important moral principles. To manage this, actors engage in “moral disengagement”; that is, they suspend moral principles in certain situations and contexts so that they can see their harmful behavior as acceptable to themselves.Footnote 85 This does not mean morality is suspended in all cases. Actors can draw upon morality and use it to justify forms of harm that would usually be prohibited. Albert Bandura argues that by justifying and denying wrongful or harmful conduct, diffusing or displacing responsibility for it, and dehumanizing victims in the process, actors suspend moral self-sanctions that regulate conduct and restrain actors from harming others. This allows people to harm others and still think positively about themselves.Footnote 86
Moral disengagement is crucial in generating indifference because it morally sanitizes harm and blunts feelings of shame or guilt that an individual experiences for being involved in harmful behavior. Governments are part of a network that can engage in moral disengagement at the collective level to obscure the moral implications of cooperative deterrence policies by helping to downplay, justify, or dismiss the human suffering caused by these policies. Integral to generating indifference is the interaction between the moral disengagement of actors and the social processes of cooperative deterrence. Bandura argues that moral disengagement occurs through “triadic codetermination.” This is the interaction between an individual’s personal values or beliefs, their behavior and how it shapes the wider environment, and finally the social environment that in turn shapes the individual.Footnote 87 The reflexivity between individuals and the social environment shows that the social processes of cooperative deterrence are not unidirectionally imposed upon people, but shape, and in turn are shaped by, individuals within that policy environment.
The interaction between actors and social processes weakens moral considerations from the policy process whereby the day-to-day operations of these cooperative arrangements do not adequately consider the harmful consequences of these policies. Whereas individuals may experience moral disengagement related to activities within their control, at the social and collective level moral disengagement occurs through a network of actors with shared beliefs, such as government officials and departments, leaders, lawyers, or bureaucrats, that work “to exonerate the system as a whole” by “vindicating their harmful practices.”Footnote 88 While these psychosocial dynamics can be found in unilateral migration deterrence policies as well,Footnote 89 cooperative deterrence processes such as evasion of responsibility and physical distance help make it easier to pursue deterrence goals as the suffering that results from these policies are removed from physical and moral vision.
The psychosocial effects of cooperative deterrence policies also make it easier for governments to gain support for these policies from domestic populations and policy officials by hiding or blurring the harmful consequences of them. Domestic populations worldwide have placed significant political pressure on governments to tamp down on irregular migration and have punished them at the ballot box if they fail.Footnote 90 These same populations also often do not like witnessing blatant forms of suffering. An illustrative example is how the photograph of drowned two-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi on a beach in 2015 elicited a significant outpouring of sadness and anger by civil society in Europe and beyond.Footnote 91 Cooperative deterrence helps to minimize public dissent by enabling governments to obscure the moral consequences of their policies as well as increase moral “blind spots” through social processes that place migrants and refugees out of mind and out of sight. I will now address each social process in turn.
Indifference and Cooperative Deterrence
Authorization
“Authorization” describes the process whereby obedience and duty to authority override everyday principles of morality. Individuals carrying out policies do not have to think about the moral consequences of what they are doing because they feel their actions are justified within the broader policy environment. According to Kelman and Hamilton, “When acts of violence are explicitly ordered, implicitly encouraged, tacitly approved, or at least permitted by legitimate authorities, people’s readiness to commit or condone them is enhanced. That such acts are authorized seems to carry automatic justification for them.”Footnote 92 Moreover, when orders are issued by legitimate authorities, individuals following the orders may not feel responsible for any harmful consequences of their actions, helping to ameliorate guilt.Footnote 93 This is not to suggest that people are robots without any capacity to think, but rather that following orders from a legitimate authority decreases the likelihood of moral contemplation.
Authorization plays an important role in generating indifference within cooperative deterrence policies. Governing authorities are sending the signal that deterrence measures are required regardless of the human rights consequences that result from them.Footnote 94 When Australian vessels intercept migrant boats and take them to offshore detention, this is in accordance with the official policy the Australian government has authorized and deemed necessary to achieve its objectives.Footnote 95 Human rights violations that occur in offshore detention are deemed tolerable to achieve these goals. At other times, governments create a climate that secretly approves of human rights violations without making them official policy. The Croatian government has an official policy of migrant deterrence that prevents people from traveling irregularly to the EU (thus including its own country). It has publicly criticized accusations made against Croatian police officers for enforcing border control policies in illegal ways, stating that officers conduct themselves in a legal and professional manner.Footnote 96 However, investigations by human rights groups have found that not only are violent pushbacks to Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina tolerated by Croatian government officials but orders are given by superiors to lower-level officials on how to engage in pushbacks and hide them from human rights groups.Footnote 97 The use of superior orders by authorities, even if done in secret, has helped create a policy environment for officials in which violence is to be tolerated to achieve deterrence goals.
Another way governments have often justified cooperative deterrence policies is by arguing that they serve the higher purpose of protecting state sovereignty, saving lives at sea, and tackling human trafficking and smuggling networks. These justifications are embedded in official policy documents, such as the EU’s “New Pact on Migration and Asylum,” and Australia’s “Operation Sovereign Borders,” giving governing authorities further legitimacy to authorize cooperative deterrence policies.Footnote 98 These justifications also provide a means to disengage from the harm cooperative deterrence policies produce. Suffering is seen as something that is an inevitable byproduct to achieve these goals, and the authorization of this situation helps to create an environment that promotes indifference to harm.
Indifference can be seen in Australia’s response to international criticism of its offshore detention policy. When the UN special rapporteur on torture criticized Australia for violating the UN Convention against Torture in 2015, the Abbott government responded by stating that the treatment of people in detention on Manus Island had been “reasonable under all the circumstances.”Footnote 99 Moreover, the authorization of this policy is justified in the name of saving lives at sea. Former prime minister Tony Abbott stated, “I really think Australians are sick of being lectured to by the United Nations, particularly given that we have stopped the boats, and by stopping the boats, we have ended the deaths at sea.”Footnote 100 While people dying at sea is a real problem, and action needs to be taken by the international community to help prevent these deaths, this argument is also being used strategically to justify deterrence policies. The suffering of people in offshore detention is being tolerated in what Lillehammer calls an “exclusionary” form of indifference as a signal to deter others from coming to Australia. Placing people in offshore detention marks them as an unwelcome out-group. Governments have created a policy environment that authorizes and legitimizes harmful policies that have privileged stopping the boats, and downplayed or denied the suffering of those in offshore detention.Footnote 101
Evasion of Responsibility
Feeling responsibility for harming another person is crucial in triggering feelings of guilt and shame that serve to prevent us from harming others. When that feeling of personal responsibility is removed, it becomes easier to hurt others.Footnote 102 Destination countries evade responsibility by displacing, diffusing, and eliminating responsibility for migrants and refugees. Governments strategically utilize legal arguments not only to help remove legal liabilityFootnote 103 but also to deny moral responsibility for the suffering of migrants and refugees,Footnote 104 creating psychological distance between people in destination countries and the plight of people on the move. This attempted legitimization targets a wider audience as well, who often do not have sufficient knowledge to determine whether complex international legal arrangements are consistent with or violate international law.Footnote 105 Such strategic uses of the law further obscure the moral and legal implications of these policies and the sense of responsibility for the suffering of people on the move.
The first strategy used to evade responsibility is to displace responsibility onto others. Strategies include funding foreign countries to detain refugees or conduct pullback operations, which has transferred the responsibilities for migrants and refugees onto foreign jurisdictions. Australia has consistently denied legal responsibility for its offshore detention centers, which are located in other countries, telling an Australian parliamentary committee in 2015 that it does not exercise “effective control” over those in detention.Footnote 106 This is despite human rights authorities, the UN, and Australian parliamentary committees arguing that the Australian government does exercise effective control in offshore detention because of the extent of its funding and power over policy settings.Footnote 107 Likewise, in a 2023 report, a UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission to Libya argued that the EU is complicit in crimes against humanity against migrants in Libya due to the nature of the EU’s financial and material support for Libyan pullback operations.Footnote 108 As the EU spokesman Peter Stano stated, “I don’t agree with the claims that our money is going to finance the business model of the smugglers or of those who are misusing and mistreating people in Libya, quite to the contrary. Most of the money goes in order to take care of these very people.”Footnote 109
The second strategy is to diffuse responsibility among many different actors. If responsibility for an act is distributed among many actors, rather than an individual, people are more likely to engage in harmful behavior because their personal responsibility is reduced. This is one consequence of bureaucracies, where policies are implemented not only by numerous people within one department but also in conjunction with many other government departments. Roles are divided, subdivided, and outsourced among many different actors, meaning it becomes hard to allocate one person responsible for the outcomes of the policy.Footnote 110 Australia’s offshore detention policies have input from the Australian government in terms of policy and funding, but then other roles, such as detention security and service provision, have been outsourced to NGOs and security companies, as well as to the governments of Nauru and formerly Papua New Guinea. This has allowed the Australian government to deny responsibility over the detention centers by dispersing responsibility among many other actors involved in offshore detention.Footnote 111
And the third strategy is to eliminate responsibility entirely by making no one responsible. This strategy can be seen in legal interpretations regarding whether jurisdiction is exercised on sovereign territory or if it is instead operative when governments exercise effective control over others. Governments in the United States and ItalyFootnote 112 have tried to argue that boat interceptions on the high seas are outside of their jurisdiction and therefore outside where they must exercise their nonrefoulement obligations under international law. This is based on the argument that jurisdiction is tied to one’s territory. If one is outside of one’s sovereign territory, jurisdiction cannot be exercised. However, this is different from the functional definition of jurisdiction, which is based on the idea that jurisdiction is when states exercise effective control over others. In this way, jurisdiction can be exercised on the high seas, as well as in foreign territory.Footnote 113 Both Italy and the United States tied jurisdiction to territory, meaning that boat pushbacks on the high seas fell outside of their jurisdiction. In doing so, these states can absolve themselves of responsibility for returning people to places where they are likely to be harmed because they are under no legal obligation to consider such issues. When the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture asked Italian officials conducting boat pushbacks in 2009 if they had offered migrants the option of claiming asylum, they responded by saying that it was not their “responsibility” to do so.Footnote 114 This was the legal argument Italy used to evade obligations toward migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean Sea up until 2012.Footnote 115 In these cases, nonrefoulement obligations are not shifted onto others, but disappear entirely.
Routinization
Routinization takes place at the individual and organizational level.Footnote 116 Routinization is an ordinary part of the bureaucratic process that helps governments achieve migration deterrence goals by more effectively pushing back and denying entry to irregular arrivals. It also minimizes opportunities for moral reflection and encourages a blinkered type of indifference by turning policy implementation into a routine, almost automated, practice.Footnote 117 A focus on completing tasks, such as writing emails or signing documents, alongside other people completing similar tasks, invites little reason to think about the moral consequences of how these small, everyday practices are contributing to a much bigger, and sometimes more harmful, policy. Moreover, the focus for any given individual also tends not to be on the final product, but on completing the immediate job in front of them, further reducing opportunities for moral reflection.Footnote 118
Governments use routinization to distort the moral implications of these policies in several ways. First, they remove the need for discretion from policy officials. Under Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders, anyone who arrives by boat will automatically be sent to offshore detention—no human judgement is used beyond that criteria.Footnote 119 There is no need to think about whether sending them offshore is humane, as this is what policy dictates must be done. Human Rights Watch has noted that the cooperation between Italy and Libya has been “routinized” as responsibility is transferred to Libyan vessels to intercept migrant boats. Information and intelligence is provided to Libyan officials regarding the location of migrant vessels, and then the task of intercepting and pulling them back falls to Libya.Footnote 120 This separates roles and makes Italy’s responsibility the transfer of information and intelligence, rather than having to think about what to do with an intercepted migrant vessel.
In other cases, routinization can be seen through the automatization of policies. In 2023, U.S. president Biden implemented a new policy to restrict irregular arrivals at the southern U.S. border. If someone arrived at the U.S. border, having already traveled through countries signatory to the Refugee Convention, they would be denied access to asylum unless they had already received Department of Homeland Security approval, were previously “denied asylum in a third country en route to the United States,” or had used a mobile app called CBP One to register for an asylum interview.Footnote 121 If someone arrived without using the application, they needed to show that they could not use the app (for example, they needed to show that the app was not working). If someone could not show this, or failed to follow the procedures, they would be unable to apply for asylum,Footnote 122 something that human rights groups argue breaches the right to asylum.Footnote 123
The use of the CBP One app was only one part of a broader cooperative arrangement between the United States and Mexico to prevent migrants from reaching the U.S.-Mexico border. Regardless of whether asylum seekers expressed concerns about their safety in Mexico, U.S. and Mexican officials turned people back if they did not meet the necessary criteria. According to Human Rights Watch, although U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the U.S. agency responsible for border security, “has repeatedly claimed it has no agreement with Mexican authorities requiring the latter to assist the US in turning back asylum seekers who arrive at a US port of entry without a CBP One appointment,” HRW stated that Mexican officials checked if asylum seekers had appointments, and if not, Mexican officials blocked their entry to the United States.Footnote 124 The cooperation on CBP One enabled routinization of processes that significantly reduced moral contemplation as the roles were divided, responsibility was distributed between different actors, and criteria was clearly set. This transformed the more difficult decisions surrounding asylum determinations into the more basic question of whether or not a meeting had been scheduled.
Another element of the bureaucratic process that can facilitate routinization is the use of euphemisms.Footnote 125 According to William Lutz, euphemisms or “doublespeak” are designed to distort language and communication by making it harder to understand what exactly is going on.Footnote 126 Euphemisms can make negative things appear positive. The use of technical language, for example, hides the consequences of harmful policies by making them seem benign.Footnote 127 The introduction of the CBP One app at the U.S.-Mexico border was called the “DHS Scheduling System for Safe, Orderly and Humane Border Processing.”Footnote 128 This ignores the fact that such a policy is neither safe nor humane, as it leaves people vulnerable to abuse, violence, and exploitation in Mexico, as well as denies them access to asylum through implementing barriers to entry. Euphemisms have also been used in Europe. Pushbacks by Italy over the Mediterranean Sea were referred to as “rescue operations,” even when people were not being rescued but pushed back to Libya.Footnote 129 Along with the automatization of policy and the removal of discretion, euphemisms make violence invisible in the policy process. This helps governments minimize opportunities for moral contemplation by officers on the ground and obscures the moral implications of the harmful consequences of cooperative policies.
Dehumanization: Psychological and Physical Distance
A final social process that can be part of cooperative deterrence of migration is dehumanization. If individuals are considered to be within one’s moral community and seen as fellow humans, it becomes very hard to hurt them without suffering adverse psychological consequences. Dehumanization makes it easier to harm others without moral self-restraints kicking in.Footnote 130 Cooperative deterrence policies have dehumanized migrants and refugees by labeling them “illegal” and “criminal” for arriving irregularly. Australia’s justification for sending irregular boat arrivals to offshore detention or pushing them back is that they have arrived “illegally” and therefore deserve to be sent to offshore detention.Footnote 131
Dehumanization also goes beyond labeling. The routinization of cooperative deterrence policies dehumanizes individuals by preventing individuals from being seen as humans who have their own stories, feelings, and histories, and instead talks about them as objects to be deterred, moved around, and deported. As a result, operational efficiency overtakes moral principles. For example, the EU has stated that it will continue to support Libya’s pullback policy because it has been effective in reducing the number of arrivals, assessing the policy not in terms of the harm it is producing but of whether it is achieving policy goals.Footnote 132 The dehumanization that occurs through routinization creates psychological distance between policymakers and migrants and refugees as the human consequences of these policies are placed out of sight and the sense of “shared humanness” is lost as human beings are seen as objects.Footnote 133
Alongside psychological distance, physical distance also plays an important role in dehumanization. Although it is possible to have empathy for distant suffering,Footnote 134 physical distance can nevertheless inhibit the effectiveness of moral principles when combined with psychological distance. Stanley Milgram showed in his obedience study that people were more likely to administer a harmful electric shock to others when they could not see or hear them. When the individual receiving the shock was right next to the person administering it, subjects became more resistant to following the order to shock.Footnote 135 Distance is important because it makes it harder to see the consequences of one’s actions, resulting in the “neutralization of people.” Kelman and Hamilton argue that neutralization makes the victim of harm disappear: “Actors—characteristically in organizations whose goals and procedures do not normally call for intended harm to anyone—may simply ignore the target or even lose awareness that there is a human target who is affected by the action.”Footnote 136 In doing so, not only does neutralization absolve moral conflicts, as people do not have to hear and see the victim, thus placing fewer emotional strains upon themselves, but the victim also becomes abstract and invisible, making them easier to harm.Footnote 137 Physical distance has been noted as being crucial in enabling widespread atrocities, such as the Holocaust, to occur.Footnote 138
Cooperative deterrence arrangements are structured in such a way as to make use of physical distance. David Scott FitzGerald refers to migration deterrence as “remote control policies,” as they aim to prevent the movement of people at a distance.Footnote 139 Pushbacks occur on the high seas, far from sovereign territory. Australia’s offshore detention provides physical distance by sending people to Nauru. Using neighboring states, such as Mexico in the case of the United States, as buffer countries helps to facilitate the effects of increased physical distance, as deterrence policies are being implemented in another country. This element of the policy structure thus not only helps destination countries evade legal liability, as well as prevent people from reaching their territories and gaining access to asylum, but it also pushes migrants and refugees out of sight and out of mind. The connection between a country’s deterrence policies and the outcome for the returnee is disconnected through physical distance, transforming the individual into an abstract figure that is forgotten.
Challenging the Psychosocial Dynamics of Cooperative Deterrence
Destination countries have constructed cooperative deterrence policies to evade their legal obligations to migrants and refugees as well as to legitimize, deny, and obscure the harmful effects of these policies. The processes of authorization, evasion of responsibility, routinization, and physical and psychological distance shape the policy environment to distort perceptions of human suffering and enable moral disengagement from the harm that these policies produce. Not only does this provide fewer opportunities for moral contemplation but it also removes concern for migrant and refugee rights from the policy process, enabling governments to privilege migration deterrence in the face of brutal forms of harm.
How, then, can this dark side of international cooperation be challenged? Although these social processes weaken moral restraints, feelings of responsibility, and moral reflection, they do not eliminate them. Challenging indifference is therefore a political struggle. Actors must fight these social pressures to expand the circle of empathy to reduce opportunities for moral blind spots to emerge. This is possible and has happened already. Activists, human rights groups, UN authorities, and some courts have pushed back against these policies by criticizing or ruling against them. Whistleblowers in Australia and Croatia have spoken out against their government’s migration policies.Footnote 140 Policymakers in the U.K. internally protested against the government’s then attempt to send people for asylum processing to Rwanda.Footnote 141 A Biden administration special envoy to Haiti resigned after he disagreed with the government’s policy of returning people to Haiti during a time of civil conflict.Footnote 142 And in 2025, the Trump administration faced pushback against its deportation policies from state governments, as the latter have implemented laws that restrict cooperation between state and federal authorities on immigration matters.Footnote 143 These acts of resistance show that moral contemplation can still occur under these social pressures.
Challenging these social processes requires the capacity to think outside of the current policy framework and be exposed to views that promote solidarity with others. This can be done in several ways. First, the policy environment can often be closed off to alternative views. However, opening such policy environments to the scrutiny of other actors, such as independent monitors or human rights authorities, can help actors to challenge the justification and legitimation of harm and enable actors to better reflect on how their actions impact others.Footnote 144
Second, strengthening feelings of responsibility for policy outcomes can make it harder for people to disregard the suffering of others.Footnote 145 An important aspect of this strategy is interpreting international law in a manner that best protects human rights, including ensuring concepts such as jurisdiction are defined in a manner that offers the strongest human rights protections. Defining jurisdiction as tied to territory, as some states have done, can lead to a sense of “irresponsibility.”Footnote 146 However, defining jurisdiction as when a state exercises “effective control” over another person helps to expand the concept of responsibility by extending it extraterritorially.Footnote 147 This allows fewer gaps in international law to emerge where states can evade responsibility.
Third, although routinization is an everyday part of modern bureaucracies, trying to limit certain types of tasks from becoming routinized could help to encourage moral reflection. For example, simply rejecting people from applying for asylum because they did not use a mobile phone app to register their asylum application leaves little opportunity to reflect on the human costs of such a policy. This does not suggest that attempts to enhance bureaucratic efficiency should cease. There is nothing wrong with bureaucratic efficiency when policies are consistent with international human rights. Rather, bureaucratic efficiency needs to ensure it does not have detrimental effects on human rights. This could include migration reform to increase legal pathways,Footnote 148 or developing cooperative sharing partnerships that routinize equitable responsibility-sharing relationships based on international solidarity and human rights principles.Footnote 149
And finally, there is the need to challenge the dehumanization and neutralization that can result from cooperative deterrence. Undermining dehumanization requires expanding one’s “moral imagination” to see a common humanity.Footnote 150 Building a common humanity also involves ensuring policymakers view migrants and refugees as human beings.Footnote 151 Incorporating international human rights law into policy settings can set standards of humane conduct and force individuals to think about rights when making policy. Social psychologists have argued that the practice of considering the interests of others can, over time, normalize such thinking and enable it to be incorporated into an actor’s identity.Footnote 152 Implementing such a strategy to bring about changes in the outlooks of policymakers and officials would take time, but doing so is necessary to undermine dangerous dehumanizing pressures and help widen the scope of moral concern to include the suffering of migrants and refugees.
Conclusion
Cooperative deterrence represents the dark side of international cooperation. We see that cooperation does not represent an inherent good. In this case, cooperation results in estranging human beings from one another and generating indifference to human suffering. Migrants and refugees become objects to be stopped, returned, or deported, not human beings who are fleeing persecution or who need safety. Governments have used authorization, routinization, evasion of responsibility, and the dehumanizing effects of psychological and physical distance to weaken moral restraints and opportunities for moral reflection. In doing so, the harmful consequences of migration and refugee policies become obscured, tolerated, and justified as states cooperate with one another to prevent irregular arrivals at their borders.
Focusing on the psychosocial dynamics of cooperative deterrence sheds new light on indifference and the role it plays in migration deterrence policies. Although scholarship on criminalization, securitization, and legal evasion provides important insights into the negative effects of migration deterrence, it does not explore the complex psychosocial dynamics that allow actors to suspend moral self-sanctions and show indifference to human suffering. Understanding how governments can both perpetuate and remain indifferent toward so much harm is difficult without recognizing the role that psychosocial forces play in policy processes.
This argument also has important implications for protecting international refugee and human rights frameworks. Moral disengagement and the social processes of cooperative deterrence provide excuses and strategies that inhibit compliance with international human rights and refugee law.Footnote 153 Alternative psychosocial forces that humanize others need to be woven into the policymaking process to undermine strategies that enable actors to violate human rights. Understanding these psychosocial dynamics is therefore necessary to uphold international human rights and refugee law, expand the moral community, and strengthen moral reflection in international society.
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