The Relativity of Warfare: When Other People’s Wars Become Background Noise

Saturday 22 August 2026

War is absolute for the person underneath the artillery shell. It is curiously relative for everyone else.

A Russian missile descending upon an apartment building in Ukraine is not experienced by its victims as an episode in geopolitics. Nor is a Sudanese family fleeing militia violence engaged in an academic exercise concerning post-colonial state formation. To those caught inside wars, the distinctions between nations, armies, ideologies and historical grievances are painfully precise. They know who is shooting at whom, why one village is safe and another is not, which uniform means danger and which road must not be travelled after dark.

Yet viewed from sufficiently far away, these distinctions have a tendency to dissolve. Europeans who would be appalled by the suggestion that Ukrainians and Russians are merely “a bunch of Slavs fighting one another” may themselves look upon a civil war in Africa and see, consciously or otherwise, little more than “a bunch of Africans fighting one another”. From parts of Asia, meanwhile, the war between Russia and Ukraine can appear as another distant European conflict between peoples who look similar, speak related languages and inhabit countries that once belonged to the same political entity.

The uncomfortable truth is that human beings understand foreign wars through distance — geographical, cultural, historical and emotional — and distance compresses differences.

The view from far away

Consider how the Russian invasion of Ukraine might appear to an intelligent but only moderately interested observer in Indonesia, Malaysia or southern India. Russia and Ukraine are neighbouring former Soviet republics. Their populations are predominantly Slavic. Their languages are related. Both inherit substantial elements of Soviet culture. Millions of families contain Russian and Ukrainian relatives. Both armies employ weapons derived from the same Soviet technological tradition and, particularly during the earlier phases of the war, sometimes used remarkably similar equipment.

To Europeans, none of this makes Russians and Ukrainians interchangeable. The differences are obvious because Europeans possess the cultural magnification necessary to see them. Kyiv is not Moscow. Ukrainian is not Russian. The histories of the Russian Empire, Holodomor, Soviet rule, Ukrainian independence and the revolutions of 2004 and 2014 provide essential context. The political systems of contemporary Ukraine and Russia are radically different. Above all, the legal distinction between aggressor and victim is straightforward: Russia crossed Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders with a massive military force in February 2022.

Nevertheless, an observer thousands of kilometres away may perceive something different: two eastern European peoples, historically entangled with one another, engaged in an extraordinarily bloody dispute over territory and political alignment.

Europeans should hesitate before condemning such indifference too severely because Europeans have practised precisely the same intellectual compression elsewhere.

The Second Congo War, fought principally between 1998 and 2003 but followed by continuing conflicts, involved an extraordinarily complicated constellation of governments, rebel movements, ethnic communities and foreign armies. Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe intervened on one side; Rwanda and Uganda on another; Burundi participated; Congolese factions proliferated and alliances shifted. The conflict and its consequences caused immense human suffering.

How many educated Europeans could explain the principal parties?

How many could distinguish the motivations of Rwanda from those of Uganda, identify the principal Congolese armed movements or explain why control of particular regions mattered? For many outsiders it was simply another African war.

Cultural distance destroys resolution

This is not necessarily racism, although racism can intensify it. It is partly a more general limitation of human attention.

People possess finite quantities of historical knowledge and emotional concern. They understand nearby societies at higher resolution than distant ones. A British person may immediately recognise that a conflict between England and Scotland would not simply be “British people fighting each other”. A Serb, Croat or Bosniak would find grotesquely inadequate any description of the Yugoslav wars as merely “Balkan people killing one another”. A Korean would hardly regard a renewed Korean War as an inexplicable quarrel between culturally indistinguishable Asians.

Yet the farther away the observer stands, the more detail disappears.

This might be called the diminishing resolution of geopolitical perception. At close range we perceive individuals. A little farther away we perceive communities. Farther still we perceive nations. At the greatest distances we perceive categories: Arabs, Africans, Europeans, Slavs, Asians.

Wars thereby become progressively less comprehensible as they become culturally more remote.

The phenomenon is particularly striking because physical resemblance often encourages outsiders to underestimate political difference. Europeans sometimes struggle to distinguish between ethnic or national groups elsewhere whose differences are immediately apparent to members of those groups. The reverse is equally true. To many non-Europeans, Europeans look culturally much more homogeneous than Europeans imagine themselves to be.

Yet some of history’s bitterest wars have occurred precisely between closely related peoples.

Serbs and Croats speak mutually intelligible languages. Germans and Austrians share a language. Indians and Pakistanis possess extensive cultural overlap across their border regions. North and South Koreans belong to what was, within living historical memory, a single nation. Russians repeatedly insist upon the cultural closeness of Russians and Ukrainians — indeed Vladimir Putin has notoriously employed that supposed closeness as part of his ideological justification for denying the legitimacy of a separate Ukrainian nation.

Similarity does not prevent conflict. Sometimes it aggravates it.

The narcissism of small differences

Sigmund Freud popularised the expression “the narcissism of minor differences” to describe the peculiar hostility that can arise between neighbouring communities possessing much in common. The concept should not be treated as a universal explanation for warfare but it captures something important.

Human beings do not necessarily fight because they are radically different. They frequently fight over precisely those distinctions outsiders find trivial.

Religion provides obvious examples. To an atheist observer, wars between Catholic and Protestant Christians or Sunni and Shia Muslims can appear incomprehensible because the competing communities share so much theology. Yet to participants the disputed differences may define identity itself.

Nationalism operates similarly. Nations are partly constructed by distinctions — language, memory, religion, historical experience, political institutions, myths and symbols. The closer two societies are, the more vigorously they may sometimes insist upon what separates them.

Ukraine provides an unusually important contemporary example. Russian imperial ideology emphasises commonality: common ancestry, Orthodox Christianity, linguistic proximity and shared Soviet history. Ukrainian national identity increasingly emphasises precisely what Russian imperial narratives seek to erase — a separate language, political tradition, historical experience and European orientation.

Hence an Asian observer saying that Ukraine looks like “Slavs fighting Slavs” may be describing accurately how the conflict appears from a great cultural distance while simultaneously missing almost everything necessary to understand it.

The same is true when Europeans dismiss African conflicts as Africans fighting Africans.

Africa is not a country — and neither is Europe

Africa contains more than fifty sovereign states, thousands of languages and an immense variety of political, ethnic, religious and historical traditions. The distance between Moroccan and Congolese political culture is hardly less significant than that between Norwegian and Bulgarian political culture.

Yet European reporting has historically tended to compress African violence into generic categories: tribal conflict, civil war, insurgency, instability.

Imagine reversing the vocabulary.

Suppose an African newspaper described the Northern Ireland Troubles primarily as tribal warfare between rival white Christian communities. Imagine the Yugoslav wars reported as clashes between European tribes possessing obscure historical grievances. Imagine Ukraine described merely as an intra-Slavic territorial dispute arising from the collapse of a former empire.

Each description contains a fragment of truth. Each is nevertheless profoundly inadequate.

This exercise reveals how much apparently neutral geopolitical vocabulary depends upon perspective. Europeans have “nationalism”, “constitutional crises” and “wars of independence”. Distant societies have historically been more readily assigned “tribalism”, “sectarian violence” and “ancient ethnic hatreds”.

The distinction is sometimes legitimate — tribal structures and sectarian identities genuinely matter in particular conflicts — but the vocabulary can also conceal intellectual laziness. European wars are studied until their complexity becomes visible. Foreign wars are sometimes simplified until their complexity disappears.

Media creates moral geography

Modern media reinforces this effect because news organisations must allocate scarce attention.

A missile attack killing twenty people in a European capital may receive enormous international coverage. Twenty deaths in an African civil war may barely register outside the region. This does not necessarily represent a conscious judgement that European lives are more valuable. Audiences respond more strongly to places they know, societies resembling their own and events perceived as affecting their security.

Nevertheless, repeated over decades, these choices create a moral geography.

Some wars become world-historical events. Others become background noise. Ukraine has benefited — if that word can possibly be appropriate in the circumstances — from being fought at the centre of European strategic consciousness. It involves Russia, a nuclear superpower; NATO’s eastern frontier; European energy markets; American military assistance and the future architecture of European security. There are compelling objective reasons for extraordinary Western attention.

Yet strategic importance cannot explain everything. Sudan’s civil war has produced suffering on an enormous scale. The conflicts of eastern Congo have persisted through generations. Myanmar has undergone a sprawling civil war following the military coup of 2021. These conflicts periodically enter Western consciousness and then recede.

For their inhabitants they never recede.

Every war is the centre of the world somewhere

This is perhaps the most important principle for understanding the relativity of warfare. Every serious war is the centre of the world to somebody.

For Ukrainians, the Russo-Ukrainian war is not one geopolitical crisis amongst many. It determines whether families remain together, whether cities have electricity, whether children sleep underground, whether men return from military service and ultimately whether their state continues to exist in recognisable form.

For a Sudanese family, Sudan occupies precisely this psychological position. For civilians in eastern Congo, the armed groups operating around their communities are not obscure acronyms in a foreign newspaper. They determine whether crops can be planted, roads travelled and children sent safely to school.

The hierarchy of importance changes according to where one stands.

This does not mean that every conflict is morally equivalent or strategically equal. Wars have aggressors and victims. Some conflicts threaten the international system more directly than others. Nuclear powers matter differently from small states. Treaty obligations, economic connections and geographical proximity properly affect government policy.

Relativity of attention must not become relativity of truth.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not cease to be aggression because an observer in Jakarta finds the historical distinctions between Russians and Ukrainians difficult to follow. Nor do atrocities in an African civil war become meaningless because Europeans cannot identify the factions committing them.

Rather, recognising the relativity of warfare should encourage intellectual humility.

The view from nowhere

There is no entirely neutral geographical perspective upon war. Westerners naturally see European wars more clearly. Asians naturally devote greater attention to Asian security. Africans understand distinctions within African politics that outsiders routinely overlook. The Middle East possesses its own hierarchy of historical memories and existential anxieties. The challenge of serious international analysis is therefore to resist the optical illusion created by distance.

When confronted with a remote conflict, one useful intellectual discipline is to imagine how one’s own wars would sound if described with equivalent indifference. “Slavs fighting one another” sounds offensive to Ukrainians because it obliterates nationality, history, agency and aggression. “Africans fighting one another” ought to sound equally suspicious.

The closer one examines almost any war, the more the apparently irrational becomes explicable. There are histories of dispossession, security dilemmas, collapsing states, ambitious politicians, foreign sponsors, economic interests, ideological movements, territorial claims and memories of previous violence. Sometimes these explanations reveal genuine grievances. Sometimes they reveal cynical manipulation. Usually they reveal both.

From thirty thousand feet, however, everything becomes tribal warfare.

That may ultimately be one of the strangest characteristics of human conflict. The differences for which people are prepared to die are frequently invisible to everyone except the people doing the dying.

A Ukrainian soldier and a Russian soldier may look almost indistinguishable to an observer in distant Asia. Two African militiamen from communities whose names scarcely register in Europe may appear equally indistinguishable to a television viewer in London.

Yet each inhabits a universe of historical distinctions that seems self-evidently important from within.

War therefore has two realities. There is the intimate reality, in which every village, accent, flag and grievance matters enormously. Then there is the distant reality, in which the distinctions collapse and the participants become categories.

Civilisation perhaps consists partly in making the effort to move intellectually from the second towards the first — to understand that what looks from afar like merely another collection of foreigners killing one another is, when viewed closely enough, populated by individual human beings for whom the differences, the dangers and the dead could hardly be more real.