Global Dialogues

Powerlessness?

I sometimes wake up and feel like the world is collapsing. Wars are happening without resolution, and AI is advancing faster than our ethics and laws–not to mention the climate crisis. It makes me wonder, what can someone like me actually do? I am not a policymaker, I don't sit at the tables where decisions are made. I am just a student. Am I powerless though?

The recent Gen Z movement in Nepal, where thousands of young people filled the streets to demand accountability and end corruption, is a testimony for me that everyone holds power, but it is only effective when exercised collectively. They were not politicians or wealthy elites, they were just students, workers, ordinary people like us, risking everything to insist that their voices matter. Their courage forces me to confront the question: if they can stand up under threat, what excuses do we make in safer contexts for our silence.

The truth is, powerlessness is often manufactured. It is constructed through politics. Think about it: human beings are the ones who invented the very idea of hierarchy, we are the ones who chose to make certain people powerful and some powerless. In that case, don't we hold the power to reshape the concept of power itself? I believe so, because if not, we are being complicit in normalizing powerlessness. I sometimes catch myself thinking: maybe this is just how the world is, maybe the best I can do is adapt. But then I see climate strikers, women in Iran who risked everything to chant Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom), and I remember that resignation is exactly what oppressive systems count on. Systems are built on the basis of making people powerless.

So the question is not just how to build community, but how to build communities that bite back, that refuse to mistake visibility for impact, and that make demands rather than just statements. True solidarity means discomfort. It means asking why certain voices dominate even progressive movements and why “youth inclusion” so often looks like tokenism? Powerlessness may be the feeling of our times, but it is not the end. Confronting it means daring to demand something better, even when the world tells us No. But then it all comes down to the individual level, can we, in our small ways, practice the democracy we wish to see?

Shahid Usman (SFS'28) is a sophomore in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University Qatar.