POWER 50 · Day 37 — Contemporary Global Concerns — I: Democracy · Environment · Gender Justice

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POWER 50 is fifty capsules across fifty days — the whole PSIR syllabus revised once, in the order the syllabus is actually built, one topic a day. The method is simple, and it only works if you hold to it: read the capsule, write the same day, don’t break the chain. Running alongside are PSIR Dynamics 2026 and the PYQ Vault — 560 previous-year questions across the fifty days, roughly eleven a day — so that your revision and your writing practice move together rather than in separate seasons.

Day 37 — Contemporary Global Concerns — I

Today opens the two-part unit on borderless concerns, where the collective good meets national interest and agreed principle meets actual practice. Part A works through Democracy — its meaning and the democratic peace theory, Huntington’s waves and Larry Diamond’s democratic recession, illiberal and delegative democracy, the modernisation thesis with India as its standing exception, and the contemporary paradox of backsliding and backlash. Part B turns to the Environment — environmental security and the Copenhagen School, reformist versus radical ecology, the North–South divide and CBDR, India’s Panchamrit and the road from Stockholm to Glasgow. Part C closes with Gender Justice — sex versus gender, feminist IR from Enloe and Tickner, gender in the global economy, and the Red Lipstick Movement. Across all three, the tension the capsule keeps returning to is the same one — between principle agreed and practice delivered. Between 2016 and 2025, this unit carried 5 × 20-markers, 3 × 15-markers and 3 × 10-markers — eleven questions in ten years.

Write before the evening:

1. The twin process of ‘democratic backsliding’ and ‘democratic backlash’ — explain the paradox. (UPSC 2025, 20m)
2. The USA’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement — assess the future prospects on climate control. (UPSC 2017, 20m)
3. The Red Lipstick Movement in the context of feminist rights. (UPSC 2025, 10m)

If you go blank on a point, it is covered in full in the Foundation and OGP class notes and handouts — revise it, then write.