Contemporary Sources of Human Rights Violations

Abstract

Understanding the current disjuncture between human rights, authoritarianism, populism, nationalism, globalization, and forced migration has never been more urgent, especially in the face of gradual collapse of the liberal world order. Failure to address human rights violations will have grave consequences. Without understanding the sources of human rights violations, international human rights standards will do little to ensure their realization across the globe. Yet it is unrealistic to search exclusively for general laws and discernible patterns of human rights violations that could be held across all cases. While it is possible to systematically explore both proximate and underlying causes of human rights violations, such an analysis must be grounded in theory. It is thus important to unpack the sources of endemic human rights abuses, including those having to do with authoritarianism, xenophobic nationalism, sectarianism, torture, child labor, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, genocide, forced migration, human/sexual trafficking, statelessness, and refugee crisis. To that end, there are two broad categories of human rights violations: domestic and international. Although there is agreement on the most pressing problems of human rights violations, there is no consensus over the answers. Our findings have broader implications for literature on human rights abuses, moral responsibility in the postliberal world order, and social justice.