THE HIGHER LENS : 23

The Geography of Luck

The idea of meritocracy rests upon an intuitively attractive proposition: that individual outcomes should broadly reflect individual effort. We are encouraged to understand education, professional success and social mobility through the language of ambition, discipline and personal responsibility. What this account often neglects, however, is the extent to which opportunity is geographically preconditioned. Before talent can be exercised or ambition translated into achievement, individuals inherit a political, economic and institutional environment they had no role in selecting.

Birthplace is, in this sense, one of life's most consequential lotteries.

This is not simply an observation about disparities in national wealth. Geography mediates access to political stability, education, healthcare, physical security, mobility and functioning institutions. It can determine the strength of the passport one inherits, the reliability of the state one encounters and even the extent to which imagining a distant future is a reasonable exercise.

The arbitrariness becomes clearest when considering children, precisely because there can be no credible argument that they have earned their circumstances.

A child born in Britain and a child born in Gaza may possess comparable intelligence, curiosity and potential. Yet their ability to exercise those qualities is conditioned by profoundly different political realities. The Palestinian child does not bear responsibility for the conflict into which they were born, just as the British child cannot claim personal credit for inheriting relative political stability. Yet geography determines which child is more likely to experience uninterrupted schooling and which may encounter displacement, destruction and insecurity before reaching adulthood.

The same principle is visible in Ukraine. Russia's full-scale invasion did not simply alter territorial boundaries or geopolitical alignments; it transformed the range of ordinary possibilities available to millions of people. Education was disrupted, families displaced and communities reorganised around the exigencies of war. In Sudan, meanwhile, conflict has similarly demonstrated the fragility of assumptions that those living in stable societies rarely have reason to interrogate: that hospitals will function, schools will remain open, food will remain accessible and the state will retain some capacity to protect civilian life.

These cases expose an uncomfortable limitation in the language of individualism. We routinely evaluate people according to what they have accomplished while paying considerably less attention to the conditions under which accomplishment became possible.

This is particularly important when discussing meritocracy. Merit matters, but merit requires an environment in which it can become consequential. Intelligence has less opportunity to translate into academic achievement when education is repeatedly interrupted. Entrepreneurial ability is constrained where institutions are dysfunctional. Political ambition means something very different where dissent carries personal danger. Hard work remains meaningful in every context, but its capacity to produce particular outcomes is not evenly distributed.

In other words, effort may be individual, but opportunity is structural.

Passport inequality perhaps provides the most tangible illustration. Citizenship is generally acquired through circumstances of birth rather than achievement, yet it can profoundly influence an individual's capacity to travel, study, work and seek security elsewhere. For someone holding a passport with extensive mobility rights, crossing borders can become administratively mundane. For another person, the same border may represent months of applications, financial requirements, rejection or complete immobility.

We seldom describe this as luck because privilege is particularly difficult to recognise when it takes the form of normality.

Political stability feels unremarkable until it disappears. Reliable electricity rarely registers as an advantage when it has always existed. Access to education can appear to be merely a personal opportunity rather than the product of decades of institutional development. Even the ability to criticise one's government publicly can become so routine that its political significance is forgotten.

Recognising these advantages does not require guilt. Guilt implies responsibility for circumstances over which an individual exercised no control. Gratitude is more intellectually and morally productive because it requires acknowledgement without demanding self-reproach.

There is also an important danger in reducing people living under adverse circumstances to their adversity. A Palestinian child is not defined exclusively by conflict; a Ukrainian is not reducible to displacement; a Sudanese person is not synonymous with humanitarian crisis. To discuss geographical inequality responsibly is to recognise constraint without denying agency.

Indeed, some of the most remarkable forms of human achievement emerge precisely where favourable conditions are absent. But exceptional resilience should not become an excuse for structural inequality. Celebrating the individual who succeeds despite extraordinary barriers does not justify the existence of those barriers.

This distinction complicates one of modern culture's favourite descriptions of success: the “self-made” individual.

The phrase is appealing because it assigns authorship of success almost entirely to the person who possesses it. Yet nobody constructs a life independently of social and institutional infrastructure. Our achievements are undoubtedly ours, but the conditions that make them achievable often are not. Education systems, legal protections, public infrastructure, family circumstances, peace and citizenship form an architecture of opportunity that can remain largely invisible to those fortunate enough to inhabit it.

Acknowledging this does not diminish achievement. It contextualises it.

For me, that is where the geography of luck becomes less an abstract political argument and more a reason for gratitude. There are aspects of my life that I have worked for, and others that preceded any effort I could possibly have made. I did not earn the stability surrounding my education. I did not earn freedom of movement by virtue of being more deserving of it than somebody born elsewhere. I did not create the institutions that have allowed my ambitions to become plausible.

Those facts do not invalidate ambition. They make me more conscious of the conditions that permit it.

Perhaps the more sophisticated understanding of success, then, lies somewhere between determinism and meritocracy. Geography does not dictate everything we become, but neither do we construct ourselves independently of it. Human beings exercise agency within structures they did not choose, and those structures distribute possibility profoundly unequally.

And perhaps what I will never fully reconcile is the knowledge that, only miles away, there may be a girl my age with the same ambitions as mine, perhaps more talented, more articulate, capable of writing these very words better than I ever could, yet while I have the privilege of writing them from a place of security, she may be writing from a refugee camp, separated from the life she might have built not by merit, intelligence or aspiration, but by the arbitrary geography of where we happened to be born.

We do not choose where we begin.

The least we can do is recognise how much that beginning matters.

Vlera Gara