A historical-philosophical approach to power, sovereignty, legitimacy, and interdependence — from Machiavelli to the contemporary world order.
Welcome. This site is your reference, your revision archive, and your guide for every assessment in the course. IB Global Politics is not a survey of current events — it is a discipline with theoretical depth and historical roots. The course you are about to take moves chronologically from Machiavelli's Renaissance through Enlightenment liberalism, industrialism, the era of world wars, and the contemporary international system, building the conceptual vocabulary you need to analyze the political world rigorously.
Four key concepts — power, sovereignty, legitimacy, and interdependence — will return again and again. They are the analytical spine of the course and the framework on which Paper 1, Paper 2, and your Engagement Project will all hang. The goal is not memorization but fluency: the ability to bring those concepts to bear on any case study, contemporary or historical, and to do so with the precision examiners reward.
Use this site liberally. Lesson pages give you the daily work; revision guides scaffold the assessments; the research section offers deeper theoretical context when you want it. Bookmark what you need, and return often.
The Renaissance in Italy, the challenge to Christian Just War theory, and the foundations of political realism — Hobbes, Morgenthau, Mearsheimer. The opening unit asks how power actually works, before we ask how it ought to.
Open Unit →Benson S. Hawk, JD
Humanities Department, Newark Academy
IB Global Politics · 2025–2026