Choosing Your Global Issue Notes

Step-by-Step: How to Craft a Strong Global Issue

1. Crafting a strong global issue matters because it’s the anchor of your entire IO.
   1. If it’s vague or weak, your analysis won’t hold up.
   2. Examiners want to see depth and real-world relevance, your issue should clearly connect your texts to something meaningful.
2. It also helps keep your presentation focused.
   1. A solid issue gives your analysis direction, so you don’t go off track.
   2. Plus, when your global issue is well thought out and specific, it makes everything else, choosing extracts, picking techniques, structuring your points, a lot easier.

3. Basically, get the global issue right, and the rest of the IO becomes way more manageable.

Step 1: Understand the IB Definition

1. A global issue must:
   1. Be relevant across multiple regions or societies
   2. Significantly impact individuals or communities
   3. Arise in everyday or familiar contexts, not just extreme cases
2. IB's Five Categories
   1. Culture, identity & community
   2. Beliefs, values & education
   3. Politics, power & justice
   4. Art, creativity & imagination
   5. Science, technology & the environment

3. You don’t actually have to pick a global issue from one of IB’s five categories and honestly, most strong IOs don’t.

Step 2: Start Broad, Then Refine

1. Begin with a general theme, then narrow it down:
   1. Broad: Censorship
   2. Refined: The psychological consequences of state censorship on personal identity

Step 3: Link to Both Texts

1. Is the issue clearly present in both texts?
2. Can I analyse techniques and authorial choices related to it?
3. Are the representations comparable or contrasting?

Step 4: Phrase It Effectively

1. Frame the global issue as a specific, insightful topic:
   1. Strong: The impact of trauma on female agency in patriarchal societies
   2. Weak: Trauma

Step 5: Test for Depth

1. A strong global issue should allow for:
   1. Multiple perspectives (e.g. oppressed vs oppressor)
   2. Thematic nuance (e.g. control, resistance, moral ambiguity)
   3. Literary technique analysis (e.g. structure, symbolism, voice)

70 Global Issue Ideas

1. Culture, Identity & Community

1. Loss of cultural identity through assimilation
2. Generational conflict in migrant families
3. Identity fragmentation in diasporic communities
4. Social exclusion due to language and accent
5. Cultural erasure through colonisation
6. Stigma against hybrid or mixed identities
7. Displacement and identity crisis in refugees
8. Cultural rituals as a source of resistance
9. The commodification of minority traditions
10. Tension between national and ethnic identity

2. Beliefs, Values & Education

1. Indoctrination in authoritarian education systems
2. Conflicts between traditional values and modern ethics
3. Education as a tool of social mobility or control
4. Suppression of dissenting ideas in academic institutions
5. Generational shifts in moral belief systems
6. The role of literature in shaping ethical worldviews
7. The impact of moral relativism on social cohesion
8. The manipulation of faith for political gain
9. Value formation through trauma and survival
10. The effect of silence and taboo in moral education