Global Politics is uniquely positioned within the IB Diploma—it draws on history, philosophy, economics, and ethics, and it speaks directly to three of the diploma's core requirements: Theory of Knowledge, the Extended Essay, and the CAS programme.
The IB mission rests on three dispositions: inquiring, knowledgeable, and caring. Each connection from Global Politics to another part of the diploma trains one of them. Theory of Knowledge is where we become inquiring—about how political knowledge is produced, contested, and used. The Extended Essay is where we become knowledgeable—extending our analysis past the syllabus into independent research. CAS is where we become caring—moving from political analysis to political action.
Few subjects in the diploma sit at the intersection of all three as squarely as Global Politics does. The course is built on contested concepts that demand TOK-style epistemological work; the Engagement Project gives every student a structured introduction to research methods that scaffold an EE; and the subject's core themes—rights, peace, development—are themselves invitations to act, not just to study. The three pages below explore each connection in depth.
How do we know what we claim to know about politics?
Political knowledge is unusually self-aware about its own contested status. The course's key concepts—power, sovereignty, legitimacy, interdependence—are not facts to memorize but ideas that scholars have argued about for centuries. Weber on legitimacy, Lasswell on power, Krasner on sovereignty: each defines the same concept differently, and the definition you choose shapes the analysis you can produce. That is a TOK problem in its rawest form.
Global Politics also opens the methodological question of how political knowledge is produced—through observation, history, theory, lived experience, data. Different methodologies yield different kinds of claims, and a sophisticated student learns to weigh them against each other rather than collapse them into one. The course's emphasis on multiple perspectives, scholarly contestation, and the relationship between knowledge and power makes it a natural site for TOK reflection.
From engagement project to independent research.
The Extended Essay is the diploma's 4,000-word independent research paper, and Global Politics is among the strongest subjects to write one in. The Engagement Project that anchors our Internal Assessment is a deliberate pre-EE—it teaches the same research moves on a smaller scale: identifying a political issue, surveying scholarly literature, integrating field research with theory, and producing a structured analysis to a rubric.
Students who choose to write a Global Politics EE find that the analytical vocabulary they have built in this course—claims and counterclaims, theoretical perspectives, scope conditions, scholarly contestation—maps directly onto what EE examiners reward. The course's command terms (examine, evaluate, discuss) are the same terms that govern the EE rubric. And the subject's tight engagement with current events ensures that research questions are never stale; the world supplies new cases every week.
From analysis to action.
CAS asks IB students to do things in the world: create, act, serve. Global Politics is structured around the conviction that political understanding is incomplete without political action. The Engagement Project requires every student to engage with a real political issue—not as an external observer but as a participant. That requirement turns CAS hours into substantive intellectual work, and it turns intellectual work into civic practice.
The course's prescribed themes—rights and justice, peace and conflict, development and sustainability—are themselves invitations to service. Volunteering with an NGO working on refugee policy, organizing around climate action, attending local government meetings on housing or policing: each of these can serve as both CAS engagement and Global Politics fieldwork. The disposition the course tries to cultivate is one in which "caring" and "knowing" are continuous, not separate.
The point of these three connections is not that Global Politics overlaps with other parts of the diploma. It is that politics, properly understood, is already a question of how we know, what we discover, and what we then do. The diploma divides those into separate programmes; this course tries to bring them back together.
— Newark Academy IB Global Politics —