The Nature of the Subject

Global Politics draws on political science, international relations, history, and the wider social sciences and humanities. You will not simply be told what to think about the world; you will learn to investigate it. You build your knowledge by engaging critically with real political issues and disputes—many of which you will choose because they matter to you.

The subject is deliberately broad, and it connects to almost everything else you study in the humanities. You develop your understanding not through abstractions alone but by researching real-world cases and examples, from your own community to the global stage.

Above all, this is a course about power—who holds it, how they came to hold it, how they keep it, and what happens to everyone else. You meet the complexity of power on the very first day, and you spend the year learning to trace how it works across the many connected dimensions of everyday life around the world.

Everything we do sits inside a simple framework. Inquiries—genuine questions—drive the course. Those questions are sharpened by concepts, given substance by content, and grounded in real contexts. The four parts feed one another constantly:

Four key concepts recur all year. They are the lenses you return to again and again, no matter the case in front of you:

Standard Level (SL) and Higher Level (HL) share the same core. Everyone studies the foundational topics and the three thematic studies—rights and justice, development and sustainability, and peace and conflict—and everyone completes an engagement project. HL goes further, with extended independent inquiry.

• Engagement Project (everyone). You identify a real political issue in a community or local setting and analyze it through your own research and action—politics you can reach out and touch.
• Extended inquiries (HL). You pursue global political challenges through case studies you choose yourself, and you add complementary research with concrete recommendations to your engagement project.
• External assessment. Paper 1 and Paper 2 are common to SL and HL. Paper 3 is for HL students only.

A large part of this course is learning to see the world through other perspectives—and to examine your own. The classroom runs on discussion, debate, and dialogue, which means listening closely both to others and to yourself in order to:

• understand views you do not share;
• reason through conflicting ideas and arguments; and
• recognize that political views are often deeply personal, and shaped by context.

Through respectful argument you begin to form your own well-informed positions while staying open to changing them. That is also how the course builds international-mindedness: by examining concepts and issues that matter across the world, comparing cases from the local to the global, and taking seriously the responsibilities you hold both in your own community and as a global citizen. The engagement project is where that responsibility turns into action.

Some of what we study is genuinely sensitive—especially where it touches personal or cultural identity. We approach those topics the way serious people do: with care, honesty, and respect for one another, and with the shared understanding that disagreement is not the same as disrespect.