The Abuse of Power as the Root Cause of Human Rights Violations
Power can be defined as the determining system that produces outcomes in the shortest time possible. In social contexts, this form of power is exemplified by the authority of the state—particularly the executive branch in systems governed by a tripartite model (legislative, judicial, and executive), or by a singular authority figure in centralized systems (king, emir, sultan, ruler).
Abuse of power refers to any action that exceeds the legitimate authority of the power holder. The most immediate and common form of abuse is the expansion of one’s power beyond its original limits. Crucially, human rights violations are not exclusive to authoritarian systems; they are a universal feature of governance. All governing systems—whether democratic or autocratic—violate the rights of some social groups. Therefore, the challenge of human rights should not be framed around the complete eradication of abuses, or the establishment of a fixed list of “non-negotiable” rights. Rather, the focus should be on creating institutions that limit harm, constrain the abuse of power, and provide systems of accountability.
Since power structures inherently produce human rights violations, one way to fully eliminate such violations would be to eliminate those power structures themselves. However, this is neither possible nor desirable, as human societies require institutions of governance and social control to manage the inherent conflicts resulting from competing interests, scarcity of resources, and other factors. The more realistic and practical course of action is to reform power systems in ways that contain their potential for abuse and ensure that any resulting harm can be addressed.
This systems-level approach is reinforced by examining the behavior of power structures and power holders. All governing authorities work—explicitly or implicitly—to embed elements that secure long-term advantage into the governing systems. This tendency is observable on both national and global levels.
At the national level, most political systems are designed not just to distribute power, but to preserve advantage for particular social groups. In the United States, for example, the structure of the Senate disproportionately empowers less populous states—many of which are historically aligned with specific racial or economic groups—over more populous and diverse ones. The result is an institutional bias that grants outsized influence to certain constituencies while diluting the political power of others. Gerrymandering, or the manipulation of district boundaries for partisan or demographic advantage, further illustrates how electoral systems are designed to empower some and disempower others. These are not technical or accidental features; they are deliberate efforts to preserve political control and social hierarchy.
At the international level, power consolidation is even more pronounced. Following the two World Wars, the victorious states have built institutions that not only reflected their dominance but entrenched it. The United Nations (UN), for example, is generally cited as a forum for international cooperation. Yet the structure of its Security Council (UNSC) reveals a system designed to permanently protect the interests of the five most powerful countries—the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China. These nations, already equipped with nuclear weapons and economic dominance, secured permanent seats on the Security Council and granted themselves the power to veto any substantive resolution. This effectively allows any one of them to override the consensus of the rest of the Council—and by extension, the global community. The remaining 188 member states must compete for the ten non-permanent seats, which rotate every two years. This institutional design does not merely reflect an unequal world—it reproduces and legitimizes global inequality.
While individual human rights abuses are grievous and demand urgent attention, a deeper injustice lies in the systemic “locking” of certain social groups into permanent positions of advantage, and others into persistent states of disadvantage. This locking is not merely a political or structural outcome—it is driven by a supremacist impulse: the belief that some groups are inherently entitled to success and power, while others must prove themselves worthy of even the opportunity to succeed. Such a logic undergirds many policies and institutional arrangements, both domestically and internationally. It creates social orders in which power and protection are seen as birthrights for some, and conditional privileges—granted sparingly or temporarily—for others. In this context, human rights violations are not simply the result of temporary failings or rogue actors; they are the predictable outcomes of systems designed to perpetuate inequality.
People of conscience should not just react to instances of abuse, but they need to challenge the systems that produce and justify them. Recent interventiosn focused on replacing one identity-based power structure with another; that did not result in significant change. The focus, then, should be on building principle-driven institutions that do not lock any community into cycles of privilege or exclusion.