The diploma's 4,000-word independent research paper—and one of the strongest subjects in the IB to write it in. The first real question is not whether to attempt one, but how you choose to approach it.
The extended essay is a 4,000-word academic essay you research and write largely on your own, over the better part of a year, under the guidance of a supervisor, on a political question you choose. Unlike the Engagement Project or the HL extension, it is a formal piece of scholarship rather than an experiential or personal one. That makes it especially suited to students drawn to political theory, to academic debate, or to the question of how data and discourse are used to move politics rather than merely describe it.
Much of the groundwork is already laid by the course itself. The Engagement Project rehearses the same moves on a smaller scale—identifying a political issue, surveying the scholarly literature, integrating evidence with theory, and building a structured argument to a rubric—so a Global Politics EE is less a leap than a longer stride.
Every extended essay now follows one of two pathways. The choice is the first real decision you make, and it shapes everything after it.
A single discipline, pursued in depth.
A subject-focused essay sits entirely within global politics. You bring the course's own apparatus—its key concepts, its theoretical perspectives, its command terms—to bear on one focused question and follow the argument wherever the evidence leads.
The guide's own model question shows the shape of it: asking how well female political leadership handles crisis, then comparing two states' responses to terrorist attacks and testing concepts of power, leadership, and conflict against the cases. Specific, comparative, and conceptually anchored—not a survey of a topic, but an argument about one.
Two disciplines under one framework.
An interdisciplinary essay pairs global politics with a second Diploma subject and analyses the question through a single shared framework. The demand here is real: both subjects must do genuine analytical work, not one supply the topic while the other merely decorates it. Done well, the pairing reaches questions neither discipline could answer alone.
Whichever pathway you take, a global politics essay argues from evidence rather than asserting from opinion. Its backbone is strong academic secondary scholarship—books, peer-reviewed articles, serious reporting—and it may be supported by primary material you gather yourself, such as interviews or original data. There is no single correct method; the design follows the question.
Every essay—subject-focused or interdisciplinary—is marked against the same five criteria, and they reward the analytical habits this course already trains. Just as important is the process around the writing: you meet your supervisor for three reflection sessions across the year, the last a short concluding interview known as the viva voce, and your thinking along the way is recorded in your researcher's reflection space. The EE grades not only the finished essay but the deliberateness of the research behind it.
The course spends two years insisting that political questions are contested, that evidence is never neutral, and that analysis is a discipline. The extended essay is where you prove you believe it—on a question that is entirely your own.
— Newark Academy IB Global Politics —