(a) Discuss the major recent social movements related to the physical rights of women in various countries of the world. (20…

(a) Movements for Women's Physical Rights

Unlike broader struggles for socio-economic parity, movements for physical rights focus explicitly on bodily integrity, reproductive autonomy, and freedom from gender-based violence. The global #MeToo movement, originating in the United States, reshaped international discourse by dismantling institutionalized silence around sexual predation and harassment. In reproductive healthcare, Latin America’s "Green Wave" (Marea Verde) led to the historic December 2020 legalization of elective abortion in Argentina, followed by court-led decriminalization in Mexico (2021) and Colombia (2022), while France wrote the freedom to have an abortion into its constitution in March 2024, contrasting sharply with widespread resistance against regressive state actions, such as Poland's Strajk Kobiet against near-total abortion bans and American mobilizations following the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) ruling. In Iran, the "Woman, Life, Freedom" uprising that followed Mahsa Amini's death in morality-police custody in September 2022 turned compulsory veiling into a mass contest over women's control of their own bodies. Across the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, grassroots campaigns against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) have reframed harmful traditional practices as severe violations of bodily sovereignty; Sudan criminalized FGM in 2020, though enforcement remains weak. In India, mass mobilization following the 2012 Nirbhaya case catalyzed the Justice J.S. Verma Committee recommendations and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013, while protests surrounding the 2020 Hathras incident highlighted the intersection of caste vulnerability and state accountability in securing physical rights, and the "Reclaim the Night" protests after the rape and murder of a doctor at Kolkata's R.G. Kar hospital in August 2024 focused on women's safety at work.

(b) Political Parties in Developing Democracies

Political parties in developing societies perform dual, often contradictory functions in democratic consolidation. Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) argued that strong parties are the key institutions through which rapidly mobilising societies avoid disorder, and Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully showed that institutionalized party systems make democracy more durable. As mechanisms of stability, they aggregate diverse social interests, confer institutional legitimacy, and facilitate the peaceful alternation of executive power. In India, a resilient multi-party system and competitive federal coalitions have historically accommodated ethnic, linguistic, and regional cleavages. Conversely, weak institutionalization frequently breeds destabilization: clientelism, patronage networks, and personalistic rule undermine constitutional checks. In Sub-Saharan Africa, dominant-party systems (such as South Africa’s ANC or Zimbabwe's ZANU-PF) have at times entrenched governance stagnation and blurred party-state boundaries. In Latin America, extreme party system volatility and institutional decay have repeatedly enabled populist leaders to bypass representative mediation. While catch-all parties moderate polarization by building broad coalitions, exclusionary ethnic parties risk exacerbating zero-sum sectarian conflict in fragile polities.

(c) NATO and US Strategic Hegemony

The argument that the United States uses NATO to perpetuate hegemony finds substance in the alliance’s structural realities. Washington maintains command primacy—the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) is invariably an American general—while persistent burden-sharing asymmetries preserve European security dependency. Post-Cold War eastward expansion integrated Central and Eastern Europe into a Washington-centric security architecture, while "out-of-area" operations in Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (after the first-ever invocation of Article 5 in 2001; NATO-led ISAF from 2003), and Libya (2011) projected American-led power beyond the North Atlantic treaty area. The 2022 Strategic Concept's first reference to China as a "systemic challenge" and Washington's 2025 push for the 5 per cent spending target at The Hague show the alliance being bent to American priorities.

However, reducing NATO entirely to a hegemonic instrument overlooks member-state agency and internal contestation. NATO's expansion has been fundamentally driven by the voluntary pull of sovereign Eastern European and Baltic democracies seeking legitimate collective defense against Russian revisionism under Article 5. Furthermore, the alliance regularly witnesses strategic pushback against Washington, exemplified by the Franco-German refusal to endorse the 2003 Iraq War, Turkey’s independent regional maneuvers, and the European Union’s ongoing initiatives toward "strategic autonomy" and integrated defense capabilities.

On balance, NATO does serve American strategic primacy, but because its members join and stay for their own security interests, it is better described as a US-led collective-defence alliance than as a mere instrument of hegemony.