Structure:

Introduction: explain the political issue, justify engagement, identify course links, explain your
personal interest

Main body: essay-style paragraphs focused on answering the research question, synthesising
engagement insights with additional sources. Apply course content.

Conclusion: answer research question and reflect on engagement

The internally assessed Engagement Activity is your chance to actively engage with a political
issue that interests you or you easily have access to. It is also an opportunity to see how the
concepts and theories of the course work in real life. You are advised to start thinking about
the Engagement Activity early on in the Diploma Programme, as the planning and executing
of the Engagement Activity can take quite a lot of time. Your original plans could also fall
through, forcing you to adapt or fully change these.

Your starting point can be A) Who do I know who is a stakeholder in a political issue?
Identifying who you already know could make it easier to undergo the engagement, especially
when there are limited opportunities to engage with stakeholders in a political issue or when
you are pressed for time. You could ask yourself: do I have a family member or friend or know
someone local who is actively involved in a political issue? This could be an aunt running a
business and being impacted by government regulations regarding sustainability, or a family
friend who is a Sociology Professor who researches group dynamics, or a local activist who is
campaigning against the construction of a factory. The political issue that you end up writing
about may not necessarily be of interest to you, but the engagement itself is easier to arrange.

Option A:

Your starting point could also be B) What political issue am I passionate about? Pursuing an
issue of personal interest usually helps you in your motivation to do the engagement activity
and additional research. It could be more difficult though to find potential stakeholders and it
may take a while before they reply or they may deny your request. If this course of action does
not work out you can always resort to option A.

Option B:

Political Issues
In Politics: who gets what, when, how Harold Laswell explains how politics is essentially about
power: those who have it and those who do not. He asks questions about where to find insight
into politics and concludes that someone who wants to understand politics may ask a political
scientist, but can just as well turn to an anthropologist, sociologist or psychologist. In other
words, pretty much any issue we look at can be politicised, made ‘political’. As you look around
you politics is everywhere; do you ever wonder why our traditions are the way they are, who
has a stake in particular political issues, why society is organised in the way it is and if those
who we think have the power, truly do have the power? The Engagement Activity is the perfect
opportunity to observe smaller scale politics in practice.

In order to narrow down the scope of your political issue, think about the following:

1. How many people are affected by this political issue? → If you focus on a city with millions
of inhabitants the political issue may already be rather broad, whereas a national issue in a
small country may be narrow enough.

2. Am I identifying specific stakeholders? → If you focus on a few specific stakeholders

(NGOs, marginalised communities, politicians, academics, media) rather than just generally
discussing your political issue you can further narrow down the political issue.

3. Am I making specific course connections? → If you focus on a specific concept or course

content (types of power, methods of protest, legitimacy of non-state actors, human rights
document, types of conflict) you can further narrow down the political issue.

4. Am I clearly defining a time frame? → If you focus on a specific time frame (a specific
protest, a political party since a recent election, the rule of a particular politician, the impact
of a law in a specific time) you can further narrow down the political issue.

Broad, unclear political issue Focused, clear political issue

 What is the impact of the United To what extent has UNICEF’s #bettermentalhealth
Nations? campaign been effective in raising awareness about
mental health issues in North Macedonia?

What is the role of the Mumbai To what extent has the legitimacy of the Mumbai City
City District Administration in District Administration been impacted by its decision to
developing the city? relocate the Mumbai metro storage shed?

How fair is the United States jury To what extent has the Equal Justice Initiative been
duty system? able to put its objections about the US jury system on
the agenda of North Dakota’s legislature?

Why do demonstrations turn To what extent have Ukraine’s Euro-Maidan protesters

violent? deliberately chosen to use violence as a method of
protest?

Why are human rights regarded To what extent was the declaration of a ‘LGBTQ-free
differently in the Netherlands zone’ in the Lublin province in Poland a violation of the
compared to Poland? European Convention on Human Rights?

Course Links

To make your Engagement Activity not just political, but Global Political you have to relate
your political issue to course content. Have a look at the overview of the course on page …
and identify possible connections. Your political issue does not have to be of global
significance, it should be a practical example of the issues we discuss in Global Politics.

You might consider relating your political issue to topics you are studying at that moment. If
you are covering a particular thematic study at the same time as you start exploring the
Engagement Activity, then consider connecting it to those particular topics. This will allow you
to benefit from the work you have already done and to demonstrate your well-developed
understanding of course content in your Engagement Activity report. However, your political
issue may relate to course content that has not yet been covered when you are doing your
Engagement Activity. Maybe because it better connects to such a topic or because your
interest lies there. If you choose to link your political issue to course content not yet covered,
you have to extensively read into these topics. A starting point could be the chapters in this
book and suggestions for further reading. If, for example, you have not yet covered human
rights, but are keen to explore this in the Engagement Activity, then you need to do extensive
additional research. Simply referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or writing
‘this violates basic human rights’ without exploring different perspectives on human rights and
the legitimacy of different human rights documents will impact the quality of your report.

Engagement Activities

There are many ways in which you can engage with politics. For the Engagement Activity to
be valid, there needs to be a specific role for you, as interviewer, intern, active participant or
creator. More passive engagements, in which you are just receiving information without
actively engaging with stakeholders, can be used in addition to active engagement but cannot
substitute it.

Surveys, unlike interviews, do not allow for direct communication between you and the
stakeholder, therefore they are not suitable as a main Engagement Activity as there is no
specific role for you to reflect upon. It is also difficult to generalise from a couple of responses
to a survey. Attending particular meetings often allows for further insight into decision-making
processes or dynamics in groups, but they often do not allow for an active role for you and
should therefore also not be considered as a main Engagement Activity. They can help with
identifying specific stakeholders and often allow for valuable preparation for an interview or
another form of active engagement.

Not valid engagement Valid engagement

Surveying peers about their Joining a Fridays4Future protest march and

concerns about climate change interviewing one of the organisers

Observing a trial at the International Observing a trial at the International Criminal Court
Criminal Court and interviewing a professor of law

Attending a local council meeting Attending a local council meeting and interviewing a
journalist

Interviewing one member of the Interviewing a member of the Salvation Army and a
Salvation Army about local local councilor about local homelessness policies
homelessness policies
 Joining a Model United Nations and Joining a Model United Nations, observing
writing about your Committee’s negotiation tactics and joining a question and
topic, Nuclear Disarmament of answer session with a guest speaker about
North Korea negotiations within UN committees

Organising a group visit to the Organising a group visit to the national parliament
national parliament and collectively and each group member focusing on a specific
asking questions to a Member of issue and actively observing and questioning a
Parliament Member of Parliament about that specific issue

Creating a recycling campaign in Creating a campaign in town to raise awareness

school to raise awareness about about littering and interviewing a member of the
sustainability and emailing an local chapter of the youth Green Party
environmental activist

Process of Engaging

Before you actually do your engagement, you should practise how you can best engage with
a political issue. Perhaps you can ask a friend or a teacher who can pretend to be a
stakeholder in a political issue. Before you formally interview or talk with stakeholders,
consider how you will record your findings. If you decide to make an audio recording, you need
to inform your interviewees and consider how this may change the dynamics of the
conversation. If you decide to take notes during the conversation, consider how this impacts
your ability to ask follow up questions and respond to the stakeholders comments. If you
decide to write down your recollection of a conversation afterwards, consider how accurately
this will reflect the conversation. If your engagement activity involves observing stakeholders,
keep a logbook with you to write down observations, either directly or after the experience.
Plenty of communication is done non-verbally, so also consider how stakeholders express
themselves in this way. Does this contradict what they are saying or does it provide additional
information about their views on the political issue? Also consider what someone does not
say. If they are avoiding to directly answer your question, or are not raising the most important
issue (‘the elephant in the room’) then you can further analyse this in the report. Diplomats
and politicians are often very good at not answering questions or avoiding topics and this also
provides insight into their views on the political issue. Your Engagement Activity starts with
gathering information about the political issue and the stakeholders you are engaging with.
This allows you to make more informed decisions as you engage with them. After your
engagement you can then synthesise or marry the knowledge you have gained through
additional sources with the insights you have obtained in the Engagement Activity.

After your first experience you should reflect on how the lessons you have learned in the first
engagement, may help you in the second engagement. A full process would then go from
conceptualising to engaging (first Engagement Activity) to synthesising to
conceptualising to engaging (second Engagement Activity) to synthesising.

Providing recommendations (Higher Level only)

At Higher Level, you have an additional 400 words to offer recommendations for the political
issue you have researched and engaged with. Recommendations should be evidence-
based, in that you use any information you’ve gained through the engagement and additional
research. They should also be realistic, considering the context of the issue and the
opportunities for improving the situation. You should also consider any limitations of a
recommendation and possible scenarios for what might not work or could go wrong.

Ethical Practice

For your engagement you should always consider the safety of the people you engage with
and your own safety. You have to carefully consider what political issues can safely be
engaged with in society. People you engage with may request you anonimise them. You
should declare this in your report and can then refer to them as Employee X or Journalist Y. If
your engagement involves minors you have to obtain permission from parents or guardians.
If these guidelines are not honoured your report could be awarded an N.

Academic Honesty

Any information you use for your report should be acknowledged, either by referring to an
Engagement Activity or by citing a source. Any claim you make should be justified. If you state
that ‘Everybody hates the president’ then this needs to be justified through a source. If you
refer to course concepts or theories, such as soft power or realism, you need to refer to an
academic source that has provided you insight into these. Not acknowledging information
coming from elsewhere can be considered plagiarism and could lead to you failing this
component. If you are working on a similar political issue to someone else, you cannot work
together on the report or share research. This is called collusion. Similarly, if you do a group
Engagement Activity, you cannot claim the work of others. You have to specify your specific
role in this Engagement Activity and cannot refer to ‘and then we visited parliament and then
we asked the Member of Parliament a question’. In the report you explain what you did and
what you learned. Experiences in the Creativity, Activity and Service programme can often
inspire you for an Engagement Activity. In this case you should ensure you are not using the
exact same experience for two different components of the Diploma Programme. You should
contact the CAS coordinator to see what part of your experiences could count for the CAS
programme and what could count for your Engagement Activity. Experiences in Global
Politics, Theory of Knowledge, other subjects or your Extended Essay could sometimes inspire
you for your Engagement Activity. When there is any overlap between subject assessments
or with your CAS programme you should ensure you are not double dipping. Your
Engagement Activity should be markedly different from those experiences and should not
simply be a reformulation of something you have already done within the Diploma Programme