ABSTRACT This article shows how politics of scale influence states’ conceptions and performances of asylum-seeker and refugee responsibility and risk. The resettlement and border security initiatives that result have dramatic consequences for the forcibly displaced, shaping their experiences in displacement based on who they are, where they are and how they got there. Using Australia’s refugee, asylum-seeker, and border externalization policy from 1976 through 1999 as a case, I document the Australian Government’s embrace of the idea that proximity engendered special responsibilities to ‘regional’ asylum-seekers, yet that over time the Government came to reject ‘the regional’ as a unique scale of responsibility, replacing it with ‘the global’. The article also demonstrates how social contexts influence conceptions of risk and obligation and become codified into moral geographies of forced migration management; embodied and territorialized through programmes of refugee resettlement, border militarization and externalization.