IB Diploma Programme Global Politics: Subject Overview

IB Diploma Programme Global Politics is for students who want to understand more about how the world they live in works, and what makes it change (or prevents it from changing) — a course built to connect abstract political theory directly to events students can recognise from current news and their own lived experience. The course draws on a variety of disciplinary traditions in the study of politics and international relations, and more broadly in the social sciences and humanities, giving it a genuinely interdisciplinary character rather than confining students to a single theoretical school of political thought. Students build knowledge and understanding of the local, national, international and global dimensions of political activity by critically engaging with contemporary political issues and challenges, moving deliberately across these different scales rather than treating “politics” as synonymous with national-level government alone.

Concepts, content and context

The course integrates concepts, content and context through inquiry. Concepts such as power, sovereignty, legitimacy and interdependence are explored and examined critically throughout the course — these are not introduced once and set aside, but re-examined against fresh content and contexts as the course progresses, so a student’s understanding of “legitimacy,” for instance, deepens cumulatively across the core topic and the three thematic studies rather than being fixed after a single early lesson. Content informs inquiries through a variety of global politics topics – political systems and actors, power interactions, frameworks, treaties and conventions, terminology, and analysis models – giving students a shared analytical vocabulary they can apply consistently even as the specific case studies and current events discussed vary from school to school. Contexts diversify and channel inquiries through contemporary real-world examples and cases. The flexible syllabus allows the course to be built around students’ own contexts and interests, as well as current events in global politics — meaning two schools teaching Global Politics can legitimately use quite different case studies and real-world examples to illustrate the same underlying concepts, core topics and thematic studies, without either being any less faithful to the syllabus.

Aims

The course aims to enable students to:

• explore and evaluate power in contemporary global politics
• examine how state and non-state actors operate and interact within political systems
• investigate and analyse contemporary political issues and challenges from multiple perspectives
• develop a lifelong commitment to active global citizenship through collaboration and agency, extending engagement with political issues beyond the classroom and beyond the course’s own assessment requirements.

How it’s assessed

Global Politics is assessed through written examinations plus an internally assessed engagement project, with Higher Level students sitting an additional paper that Standard Level students do not. At SL, Paper 1 (four structured questions drawing on the core topics of the syllabus) is worth 30%, Paper 2 (extended-response questions on the thematic studies) is worth 40%, and the engagement project is worth 30%. At HL, Paper 1 is worth 20%, Paper 2 is worth 30%, a third paper on the HL-only global political challenges extension is worth 30%, and the engagement project is worth 20%.

The engagement project is common to both SL and HL: students investigate a political issue of genuine interest to them through direct engagement – rather than through desk research alone – and then complement that experiential learning with theoretical perspectives drawn from research, submitting a written report of their investigation. HL students additionally carry out further research to formulate a recommendation addressing the identified political issue – a specific extra task that SL students do not complete. Because the topic is student-chosen, no two engagement project reports investigate quite the same political issue even within a single class, much as no two DP Geography fieldwork investigations address quite the same research question. Every DP Global Politics student, regardless of level, studies the same core topic – understanding power and global politics – together with three compulsory thematic studies: rights and justice; development and sustainability; and peace and conflict.

The core topic and three thematic studies

Every DP Global Politics student, regardless of level, studies the same core topic – understanding power and global politics, built around the concepts of power, sovereignty, legitimacy and interdependence – together with three compulsory thematic studies: rights and justice; development and sustainability; and peace and conflict. Paper 1’s structured questions draw on the core topics, while Paper 2’s extended-response essays draw on the three thematic studies, with one section requiring candidates to integrate the thematic studies with the core topics — Paper 1 rewards precise, concise application of key concepts to short stimulus material, while Paper 2 rewards sustained, developed argument across a full essay response.

HL’s additional paper and the global political challenges extension

Where SL students’ assessment is built entirely from the core topics, the three thematic studies and the engagement project, HL students additionally complete an 80-hour extension on global political challenges, examined by Paper 3 — a genuinely different kind of preparation from the core-topic and thematic-study papers, since it requires sustained independent research rather than only broad conceptual fluency. This is not a pair of case studies chosen by the school: each student independently researches their own cases, connecting them to the syllabus’s eight HL topic areas – borders, environment, equality, health, identity, poverty, security and technology – and must research at least two different case studies across at least two different topic areas. Because the specific cases are student-selected rather than fixed or school-assigned, there is no single pair to confirm with a school’s DP coordinator; what is fixed is the list of eight topic areas the research must connect to.

Why the engagement project is distinctive

Most DP internal assessments are built around desk research or a scientific investigation; Global Politics’s engagement project instead requires genuine, direct engagement with a real political issue — attending a local event, volunteering, or otherwise participating directly, rather than only researching a topic from published sources. This experiential requirement reflects the course’s explicit aim of developing “a lifelong commitment to active global citizenship,” and a report that only summarises secondary research without any genuine direct engagement component would not meet the assessment’s actual requirements.

Source

International Baccalaureate Organization, Global Politics subject brief (Diploma Programme).