Quick Answer
A strong IB Global Politics IA focuses on one clearly defined political issue and uses engagement to deepen analysis rather than replace it. The best work shows how your engagement informed your understanding, supported political analysis, and helped you reflect on different perspectives and power dynamics.
What You'll Learn
- The political issue must be specific enough to analyse properly
- Engagement should give you insight, not just an activity to describe
- Analysis should remain political and conceptual, not purely narrative
- Reflection should explain how engagement shaped your understanding
Choose One Political Issue, Not a Whole Topic Area
The strongest Global Politics IAs focus on a specific political issue that can be explored through engagement and analysis. Broad themes such as human rights, development, or inequality are not enough by themselves. You need a narrower political question that allows you to analyse actors, power, perspectives, and implications in a concrete way.
Pro Tip
If your issue is too broad, the final IA often becomes descriptive and loses its political sharpness.
Engagement Should Deepen the Analysis
Engagement is valuable when it helps you access perspectives, evidence, or understanding you would not gain from reading alone. The point is not to impress with the activity itself, but to show how it helped you think more carefully about the political issue.
- Choose engagement that is relevant to the issue and realistic to carry out
- Explain how the engagement informed your political understanding
- Use evidence from engagement selectively and analytically
- Avoid turning the IA into a diary or activity log
Watch Out
A long description of what you did is not strong analysis. Engagement should support the argument, not replace it.
Keep the IA Political and Analytical
To score well, the IA needs political analysis. That means discussing concepts, actors, interests, power, consequences, and competing perspectives. Reflection matters too, but it should connect directly to the issue and the insights gained through engagement.
- 1Analyse the issue using relevant political concepts or frameworks
- 2Consider multiple actors and perspectives
- 3Explain how engagement shaped or challenged your understanding
- 4Reflect on bias, access, and limits in the evidence you gathered
- 5Keep linking your discussion back to the central political issue
Common Global Politics IA Mistakes
These issues often weaken otherwise interesting Global Politics IAs.
- A political issue that is too broad or not clearly political
- Engagement that is described at length but not analysed
- Little connection between engagement and the final argument
- Overly personal reflection with too little conceptual analysis
- Insufficient attention to competing perspectives or power relationships