When Rights Become Weapons: Human-Rights Instrumentalization, Institutional Power, and Social Fragmentation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65655/openchristianpress.142Keywords:
human-rights instrumentalization, rights weaponization, lawfare, duties, institutional power, social fragmentation, African communitarianism, common goodAbstract
Background: Human rights are indispensable restraints on arbitrary power, persecution, discrimination, and the denial of conscience. Their exceptional moral authority also makes rights language attractive for strategic use by states, courts, advocacy organizations, donors, corporations, and digital platforms. Objective: This article develops a disciplined framework for distinguishing legitimate rights protection from human-rights instrumentalization and coercive weaponization. Methods: A bounded critical integrative review combined ten structured searches conducted through the Consensus academic discovery interface on 18 July 2026 with citation chaining and targeted retrieval from official international and regional repositories. The selection process was documented using a PRISMA 2020-informed flow. Of 140 identified records, 127 remained after deduplication, 81 reports were assessed, and 68 sources entered the coded synthesis, comprising 61 scholarly works and seven authoritative legal or policy instruments. Because retrieval was relevance-ranked and limited to ten records per query, the review is transparent and reproducible at the query level but is not presented as an exhaustive systematic review. Results: Across legal mobilization, sanctions, donor conditionality, identity conflict, platform governance, and emergency regulation, four cumulative diagnostic conditions recurred: strategic rights translation, moral foreclosure, institutional insulation, and asymmetric coercion. The article integrates these conditions in the Rights Instrumentalization and Institutional Fragmentation (RIIF) Framework, a twenty-dimension diagnostic matrix, and eight propositions for empirical testing. Conclusion: The appropriate response is not to weaken human-rights protection, but to reconnect rights with correlative duties, proportionality, conscience, reciprocity, subsidiarity, transparent evidence, meaningful appeal, and the common good. The framework is explicitly symmetrical and includes safeguards against its misuse by authoritarian governments or dominant social groups.
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