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 four core units 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 and core units, 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 activity, with Higher Level students sitting an additional paper that Standard Level students do not. At SL, Paper 1 (four structured questions drawing on the four core units of the syllabus) is worth 30%, Paper 2 (extended-response questions on the core units) is worth 45%, and the engagement activity is worth 25%. At HL, Paper 1 is worth 20%, Paper 2 is worth 40%, a third paper examining two contemporary global political challenges through case studies is worth 20%, and the engagement activity is worth 20%.

The engagement activity 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. Because the topic is student-chosen, no two engagement activity 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. The four core units common to every DP Global Politics student, regardless of level, are power, sovereignty and international relations; human rights; development; and peace and conflict.

The four core units

Every DP Global Politics student, regardless of level, studies the same four core units: power, sovereignty and international relations; human rights; development; and peace and conflict. These are examined through Paper 1’s structured questions and Paper 2’s extended-response essays, which means the same core content is tested twice, in two different formats — 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 case studies

Where SL students’ assessment is built entirely from the four core units plus the engagement activity, HL students add a third paper examining two contemporary global political challenges through case studies — a genuinely different kind of preparation from the core-unit papers, since it requires deep, specific knowledge of two chosen real-world political situations rather than broad conceptual fluency across the four core units. Confirm with a school’s DP coordinator which two case studies are being taught, since — much like DP Geography’s school-chosen elective themes — the specific content of HL Paper 3 depends entirely on a school’s own selection rather than being fixed by the syllabus itself.

Why the engagement activity is distinctive

Most DP internal assessments are built around desk research or a scientific investigation; Global Politics’s engagement activity 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).