Contemporary Global Concerns

Each of these issues has the same structure: the costs are global, the authority is national, and the states best able to act are the least willing. That mismatch, not ignorance, is what makes them hard.

This is chapter 45 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on International Relations in the Paper II syllabus. The complete book is a free download.

Democracy

The concern has inverted within a generation. The 1990s literature was about waves of democratisation, in Huntington’s account the third wave from 1974, and about consolidation. The current literature is about erosion.

Democratic backsliding in contemporary form has three features. It is executive-led: elected leaders rather than generals dismantle constraints. It is legal: emergency powers, court-packing, media regulation, electoral commission appointments and NGO funding rules are used, each defensible individually. And it is incremental, so there is no single moment at which observers can say democracy ended, which is why external responses are always late. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die and Bermeo’s typology of backsliding are the standard references.

The 2025 paper’s question about the twin process of backsliding and backlash asks for the paradox. Explanations to offer: backsliding proceeds through institutions while backlash operates in the street, so they are not measuring the same thing; economic grievance and cultural anxiety generate both support for strongman leaders and protest against them, from different constituencies; digital tools serve mobilisation and surveillance equally; and the diffusion works in both directions, with autocratic techniques and protest repertoires both crossing borders. The observable pattern is polarisation rather than uniform decline.

Human rights

The regime’s architecture: the International Bill of Human Rights, comprising the UDHR (1948) and the two Covenants of 1966; nine core treaties with treaty bodies receiving state reports and, where accepted, individual communications; the Human Rights Council (2006, replacing the Commission), whose Universal Periodic Review examines every state on a cycle; the special procedures of independent rapporteurs; and the Office of the High Commissioner (1993).

Criminal accountability: the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (1993) and Rwanda (1994); the International Criminal Court, established by the Rome Statute (1998, in force 2002), with jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and, since the Kampala amendments, aggression, operating on the principle of complementarity, so it acts only where national systems are unwilling or unable. The United States, China, Russia and India are not parties. India’s stated objections: the Security Council’s referral and deferral powers, which subject the Court to political control; the inclusion of non-international armed conflict; and the absence of terrorism and nuclear weapons use from the list of crimes.

Responsibility to Protect, agreed in paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome, has three pillars: the state’s own responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity; the international community’s responsibility to assist; and its responsibility to respond collectively, through the Security Council, when a state manifestly fails. Its high point was Resolution 1973 on Libya in 2011; the subsequent perception that the mandate to protect civilians had been used for regime change hardened Russian and Chinese resistance, which is a substantial part of the explanation for the Council’s paralysis over Syria. The concept survives normatively and is politically much weakened.

The universalism-relativism debate is treated in Chapter 5 and should be cross-referenced.

Environment

The climate regime

• Stockholm 1972 and the UN Environment Programme; Brundtland 1987 defining sustainable development as meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs.
• Rio 1992: the UNFCCC, the Convention on Biological Diversity, Agenda 21, and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.
• Kyoto 1997: binding targets for Annex I countries only, flexibility mechanisms of emissions trading, joint implementation and the clean development mechanism. The United States never ratified; Canada withdrew.
• Paris 2015: universal participation through nationally determined contributions, a temperature goal of well below two degrees with efforts toward 1.5, a global stocktake every five years, and a transparency framework. The architecture is bottom-up and the obligations are procedural rather than substantive.
• Since: the Glasgow Pact (2021) on coal phase-down; the loss and damage fund agreed at Sharm el-Sheikh (2022) and operationalised at Dubai (2023), where the first global stocktake called for transitioning away from fossil fuels; and the unmet hundred-billion-dollar annual climate finance pledge, which remains the South’s principal grievance.

The structural problem is a collective action problem of the purest kind: emissions reduction is a global public good, benefits are non-excludable, and every state has an incentive to free-ride. Differentiation, who pays given historical responsibility against current emissions, is the political core, and India’s position, developed in Chapter 52, rests on per capita emissions and on the carbon budget already consumed by industrialised countries.

Other regimes to name: the Montreal Protocol (1987) on ozone, the standard success case because substitutes existed and the industry was concentrated; the Convention on Biological Diversity with the Nagoya Protocol (2010) on access and benefit-sharing and the Kunming-Montreal framework (2022); the Basel Convention on hazardous waste; and the BBNJ agreement (2023) on marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction.

Gender justice

Instruments: CEDAW (1979), often called the international bill of rights for women, with its Optional Protocol (1999); the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995) with its twelve critical areas of concern; Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) on women, peace and security, establishing the participation, protection, prevention and relief pillars; the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime’s Palermo Protocol on trafficking (2000); Sustainable Development Goal 5; and UN Women (2010).

The persistent gaps: CEDAW has attracted more substantive reservations than any other human rights treaty, many relating to family law; participation in peace processes remains low despite Resolution 1325; the gender pay gap and the unpaid care burden are unaddressed by any binding instrument; and gender-based violence remains without a dedicated global treaty, the Istanbul Convention (2011) being regional.

The comparative movements of the last decade are treated in Chapter 37.

Terrorism

The definitional problem is the substantive obstacle, not a technicality. No universal definition exists because states disagree on two questions: whether acts by state armed forces fall within it, which several Western states resist, and whether armed struggle against foreign occupation or for self-determination is excluded, which several members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation insist upon. The formula that one state’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter is not a cliché but a description of the drafting deadlock.

The regime is therefore sectoral: nineteen instruments addressing specific acts, hijacking, hostage-taking, bombings, financing, nuclear terrorism, rather than the phenomenon. Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001), adopted under Chapter VII, obliges all states to criminalise financing, freeze assets and deny safe haven, and created the Counter-Terrorism Committee; the 1267 sanctions regime lists individuals and entities associated with Al-Qaeda and ISIL, and its listing procedure, where a single member can place a technical hold, has been India’s recurrent grievance in seeking designations. The Financial Action Task Force and its grey and black lists have proved the more effective instrument in practice.

India’s Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, proposed in 1996, would supply a universal definition and close the gaps between the sectoral instruments. It remains unadopted for exactly the two definitional reasons above.

Nuclear proliferation

The regime

The NPT (1968, in force 1970, indefinitely extended 1995) rests on three pillars: non-proliferation, under which non-nuclear-weapon states undertake not to acquire and accept IAEA safeguards; disarmament, under Article VI, an obligation to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures; and the right to peaceful uses under Article IV. It defines a nuclear-weapon state as one that manufactured and exploded a device before 1 January 1967, which is the discrimination India has always objected to.

Supporting elements: IAEA safeguards and the Additional Protocol; the CTBT (1996), which has not entered into force because of the Annex 2 requirement; export-control regimes, the Nuclear Suppliers Group formed after India’s 1974 test, the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Australia Group and the Wassenaar Arrangement; nuclear-weapon-free zones; and the Proliferation Security Initiative.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (adopted 2017, in force January 2021) prohibits development, possession and use outright. No nuclear-armed state or NATO member has joined, and its practical effect is normative stigmatisation rather than disarmament.

Assessment

Successes: proliferation has been far slower than predicted in the 1960s, when twenty-five nuclear states were forecast; South Africa dismantled its arsenal, and Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan transferred theirs; Libya abandoned its programme in 2003.

Failures: the Article VI disarmament obligation is unfulfilled and arsenals are being modernised; India, Pakistan and Israel remain outside, and North Korea withdrew in 2003 and tested; the JCPOA with Iran, concluded in 2015, was abandoned by the United States in 2018 and has not been restored; and the arms-control architecture described in Chapter 41 is eroding.

India’s position is treated in Chapter 50 and should be cross-referenced rather than repeated here: opposition to the NPT as discriminatory, a voluntary moratorium on testing, no first use with credible minimum deterrence, and the 2008 waiver that granted India access to civil nuclear trade without signing.

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