On the difference between the rulers and the ruled

Saturday 20 December 2025

Distinguishing a nation’s ruled from its rulers is one of the most important acts of moral and political clarity in international affairs. It is also one of the most frequently neglected. When states act violently, repressively or unlawfully, there is a strong human temptation to transfer blame from those who make decisions to the population over whom those decisions are imposed. History shows that this conflation is not merely an intellectual error. It is a habit that enables injustice, prolongs conflict and corrodes the ethical foundations of politics.

At its core the distinction rests on power. Rulers possess agency. They command institutions, control armed forces, set policy and choose war or peace. The ruled, by contrast, live within structures they rarely design and often cannot meaningfully resist. Even in states that hold elections, the distance between popular consent and the exercise of power is often vast. In authoritarian systems it is chasmic. To judge a population as morally equivalent to those who govern it is therefore to ignore the unequal distribution of coercion, information and risk.

This distinction matters first for justice. Collective blame is an ancient instinct, but it is a primitive one. Punishing or condemning individuals for actions over which they had no control violates the basic principle that responsibility follows agency. Civilians drafted into armies, workers taxed to fund wars they oppose, journalists silenced for dissent or families living under surveillance are not authors of state policy. They are its subjects. To treat them otherwise is to collapse ethics into tribalism, where identity replaces conduct as the basis of judgement.

The failure to separate rulers from ruled also distorts conflict itself. When populations are treated as enemies rather than as hostages of their political systems, wars harden and escalate. Indiscriminate sanctions, rhetoric that demonises entire nations and policies that erase civilian suffering all reinforce the narrative that opposition is existential rather than political. Rulers benefit from this confusion. External hostility allows them to present themselves as defenders of the nation, suppress internal dissent and redirect anger away from domestic failures. In this way, conflation strengthens precisely those regimes it claims to punish.

There is also a strategic dimension. If the goal of international pressure is behavioural change, then targeting societies indiscriminately is often counterproductive. Change rarely comes from the humiliation of populations. It emerges when people retain the social, economic and psychological space to imagine alternatives. Preserving educational exchange, cultural contact and humanitarian engagement keeps open channels through which ideas, values and solidarity can flow. Distinguishing the ruled from the rulers allows pressure to be focused on decision makers while leaving room for societies to evolve beyond them.

The distinction is equally vital within states. Governments frequently claim to embody the will, identity or destiny of the nation itself. This claim is seductive, particularly in moments of crisis. Yet it is always false. Nations are plural, layered and internally contested. To equate loyalty to the state with loyalty to the nation is to erase this complexity and to delegitimise dissent as betrayal. Democratic health depends on the opposite assumption, that disagreement with rulers is not hostility to the community but a form of participation in it.

Historical memory offers stark warnings. Entire peoples have been stigmatised for the crimes of regimes they endured, sometimes long after those regimes fell. Such judgments do not heal wounds. They freeze them. They replace accountability with resentment and reconciliation with inherited guilt. Where nations have managed to confront dark chapters honestly, it has usually been because responsibility was assigned carefully and specifically, not diffusely and vindictively.

Finally, there is a human reason that transcends politics. Every nation is composed of individuals living ordinary lives, marked by love, fear, ambition and vulnerability. To reduce them to extensions of their rulers is to deny their humanity. Moral imagination requires the ability to see people not as abstractions but as persons situated within constraints. Distinguishing the ruled from the rulers is therefore not an act of indulgence. It is an act of accuracy.

In an age of renewed great power conflict, information warfare and polarised identities, this distinction is increasingly difficult to maintain. It demands discipline, empathy and intellectual restraint. Yet without it political judgement becomes blunt, justice becomes arbitrary and conflict becomes endless. To distinguish a nation’s ruled from its rulers is not to excuse wrongdoing. It is to ensure that responsibility is placed where it belongs and that the possibility of a different future remains alive.