Glossary
Around sixty terms, searchable, each linked to the page that teaches it.
Around sixty terms, searchable. Every definition here is the one used across this site — if a page uses a term differently, the page is wrong and I would like to know.
How to use it. Do not read it end to end. Use it when you meet a term you half-know, and again in the week before a paper: cover the definitions, read the terms, and see which ones you can produce cold. The ones you cannot are your revision list.
A
- Actor
- An individual or group that can take action and influence outcomes — a state, an IGO, an NGO, a firm, a movement, a leader.
C
- Capabilities approachWhere this is taught
- Amartya Sen's argument that development should be measured by people's real freedoms — what they can actually do and be — rather than by income alone.
- Civil societyWhere this is taught
- The space of voluntary association between the state, the market and the family — associations, unions, faith groups, campaigns, movements.
- Constructivism
- A theory holding that the important features of world politics — anarchy, sovereignty, national interest — are socially constructed, which means they can change. Identities and norms shape interests, not only the other way round.
- Cultural relativism
- The position that rights and values should be understood within their cultural context rather than judged by a single universal standard. Its opposite, universalism, holds that some standards apply everywhere.
- Cyberpower
- The ability to use digital networks and capabilities to achieve political outcomes: espionage, disruption, surveillance, and the shaping of what people see.
D
- Democratic deficit
- The gap between the authority an institution exercises and the accountability it offers to those it affects. The standard critique of IGOs and supranational bodies.
- Democratic peace theory
- The claim that liberal democracies rarely, if ever, go to war with one another. Heavily studied, heavily contested, and a favourite of examiners.
- Dependency theoryWhere this is taught
- The counter-claim: poor states are poor because of how they are integrated into the global economy, not despite it. Core and periphery, not early and late.
- DevelopmentWhere this is taught
- Contested by design. Narrowly, economic growth; more usefully, the expansion of what people are actually able to be and do. Which definition you adopt decides what counts as progress.
E
- External sovereignty
- Recognition by other states as an independent equal, with the right to be free from external interference.
F
- Failed / fragile state
- A state that cannot perform core functions — security, basic services, a monopoly on legitimate force — across its territory. The label is contested, because who applies it is itself a political act.
- Feminism (in IR)
- A set of approaches asking where the women are in world politics, how gender shapes the concepts we use — security, the state, the economy — and who is made invisible by them.
G
- Game theory
- The formal study of strategic interaction — how rational actors choose when the outcome depends on what everyone else chooses. The prisoner's dilemma is its most-used example in this course.
- Generations of rights
- First generation: civil and political. Second: economic, social and cultural. Third: collective and solidarity rights. A useful revision structure, and itself a contested framing.
- Gini coefficientWhere this is taught
- A measure of income inequality from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (one person has everything). Good for comparison, poor at showing where in the distribution the inequality sits.
- Global governance
- The collection of institutions, rules, norms and practices through which cross-border problems are managed in the absence of a world government.
- Global political challengeWhere this is taught
- One of the eight HL topic areas — Borders, Environment, Equality, Health, Identity, Poverty, Security, Technology — studied through cases the student researches.
- Globalization
- The deepening of cross-border flows — goods, capital, people, information, culture — and the political consequences of that deepening, including the backlash against it.
H
- Hard power
- Getting outcomes through coercion or payment — military force, economic sanctions, inducements.
- HDIWhere this is taught
- The Human Development Index: a composite of life expectancy, education and income. Broader than GDP, and still an average that hides distribution.
- Human rights
- Rights held by virtue of being human: universal, indivisible and inalienable in principle, and in practice dependent on states willing to respect them.
- Humanitarian intervention
- Coercive action, usually military, taken across borders to prevent or halt grave human rights violations. The clearest live collision between sovereignty and rights.
I
- ICC
- The International Criminal Court: tries individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression. Complementary — it acts only where a state is unwilling or unable to.
- ICJ
- The International Court of Justice: settles disputes between states and gives advisory opinions. It rules on states, not on individuals — that is the ICC.
- IGOWhere this is taught
- Intergovernmental organization: a body created by states through treaty, with states as members — the UN, WTO, IMF, EU, AU, ASEAN.
- Informal forumWhere this is taught
- A grouping of states that coordinates without a treaty or a permanent secretariat — the G7, the G20, BRICS. Flexible, and correspondingly hard to hold to account.
- Interdependence
- Mutual dependence between actors, so that what happens to one affects the others. It can be symmetrical or deeply unequal — and the asymmetry is where power hides.
- Internal sovereignty
- Supreme authority inside the state's borders — the capacity to make and enforce rules over a population and a territory.
- International law
- The body of rules that states accept as binding between them — treaties, custom, general principles. Its distinctive problem is enforcement: it is law that mostly depends on consent.
J
- Just war theory
- The tradition asking when it is justifiable to go to war (jus ad bellum) and how war may justly be fought (jus in bello).
- Justice
- What each person is owed, and by whom. The course works with social, political, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, ecological and Ubuntu conceptions — they disagree, and the disagreement is the content.
L
- Legitimacy
- Whether an actor's rule, authority or action is accepted as rightful by the relevant audience. It explains why people comply when coercion is not being applied.
- Level of analysis
- The scale at which you examine an issue — local, national, regional, international or global. The same issue often looks different, and has different causes, at each level.
- Liberalism
- A theory in which institutions, trade, law and democracy can make cooperation durable, and in which non-state actors genuinely matter.
- Lines of inquiryWhere this is taught
- The six lenses an HL student must keep returning to across their cases — connections to core and themes, interconnections between challenges, contexts and perceptions, existing frameworks, and cross-topic lenses. Paper 3's Q3 is set from them.
M
- MNC / TNCWhere this is taught
- A multinational or transnational company: a firm operating across several states. Some have revenues larger than the GDP of the states that host them.
- Modernization theoryWhere this is taught
- The claim that societies develop through broadly similar stages — Rostow's model — and that the obstacles are largely internal.
N
- Nation
- A group of people who share an identity — language, culture, history, a sense of belonging together. A nation is a social fact; a state is a legal one, and the two frequently do not line up.
- Nation-state
- A state whose borders roughly coincide with a single nation. Far rarer in reality than in political rhetoric.
- Negative peace
- The absence of direct violence — no war, no killing. Necessary, and on its own not sufficient.
- Neo-Marxism
- A family of approaches reading world politics through economic structure and class: who owns, who produces, and how the global economy reproduces inequality.
- NGOWhere this is taught
- Non-governmental organization: a voluntary, non-profit body independent of government. Its power is typically informational and reputational rather than material.
- Nonviolent resistanceWhere this is taught
- Organised political action that deliberately avoids violence — strikes, boycotts, non-cooperation, mass protest. Erica Chenoweth's research is the standard reference for how often it works.
P
- Peacebuilding
- The long work after the fighting stops: institutions, justice, livelihoods and relationships, so the conflict does not restart.
- Peacekeeping
- Deploying third-party forces to hold a ceasefire and separate combatants. It preserves a pause; it does not resolve a conflict.
- Peacemaking
- Bringing hostile parties to agreement, usually by negotiation and mediation, to stop active fighting.
- Political issue
- Any question about how power is distributed and exercised: who decides, who benefits, who bears the cost. It usually involves disagreement between groups, competing interests, a question of authority, and a real impact on people's lives.
- Politicization of rights
- When rights claims are deployed selectively to advance political interests — condemning an adversary's violations while excusing an ally's. It corrodes the norm it invokes.
- Positive and negative rights
- Negative rights require others to refrain (freedom from torture); positive rights require others to provide (healthcare, education). The distinction shapes what a state has to do, and what it costs.
- Positive peace
- The absence of structural violence too: the presence of the institutions, relationships and attitudes that keep a society from harming its own members. Galtung's distinction.
- Postcolonialism
- An approach that treats colonial history as an ongoing structure rather than a finished period, and asks whose knowledge and whose interests the discipline's standard categories serve.
- Power
- The ability to shape outcomes — to get the results you want, usually by influencing others' behaviour. Treat it as a neutral concept: it can protect, persuade, punish, deter or enable cooperation.
- Power over / to / with
- Three grammars of power. Power OVER is domination; power TO is capacity to act; power WITH is collective strength built through cooperation. Which one an argument assumes usually decides its conclusion.
R
- R2P (Responsibility to Protect)
- The doctrine that sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect a population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity — and that if a state manifestly fails, the responsibility passes to the international community.
- Realism
- A theory in which states are the main actors, the international system is anarchic, and states pursue security and relative power. Cooperation is possible but fragile.
S
- Sanctions
- Restrictions imposed to change another actor's behaviour — trade, finance, travel, arms. Interdependence turned into a lever.
- SDGsWhere this is taught
- The seventeen Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015, running to 2030. Universal, voluntary, and much better at agenda-setting than at enforcement.
- SecuritizationWhere this is taught
- The move of describing an issue as an existential security threat, which licenses responses that ordinary politics would not permit. Always ask who benefits from the framing.
- Security dilemma
- When one state's defensive build-up looks threatening to another, which arms in response, leaving both less secure than before. The mechanism behind most arms races.
- Self-determination
- The principle that a people may decide their own political status and pursue their own development. It sits in permanent tension with the territorial integrity of existing states.
- Smart power
- Combining hard and soft power so that they reinforce rather than undercut each other.
- Soft power
- Getting outcomes through attraction rather than coercion: culture, political values, institutions and foreign policy that others find legitimate. Joseph Nye's term.
- Sovereignty
- A state's supreme authority within its territory and its independence from outside authority. Traditionally treated as absolute; in practice constantly negotiated.
- Stakeholder
- An individual or group affected by an issue, whether or not they can act on it. Every actor is a stakeholder; most stakeholders are not actors — and that gap is usually where the politics is.
- State
- A political unit with a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states — the Montevideo criteria. In practice, recognition by other states matters as much as the checklist.
- State legitimacy
- The population accepting that the state has a rightful claim to rule — belief that rule is justified, not merely obedience out of fear or habit.
- Stateless nation
- A nation with no state of its own — the Kurds, the Rohingya, the Palestinians. Statelessness is not an absence of politics; it is a particular and precarious political condition.
- Structural power
- The power to set the rules and shape the frameworks within which everyone else has to act — over finance, production, security and knowledge. It is the least visible form and often the most consequential.
- Structural violence
- Harm built into how a society is organised — poverty, exclusion, unequal access to health or justice — where no individual has to strike a blow for people to be damaged.
- Supranationality
- An arrangement in which states transfer some decision-making authority to a body above them, whose decisions bind them — the EU being the deepest example.
- SustainabilityWhere this is taught
- Meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs — across environmental, social and economic dimensions.
T
- Treaty of Westphalia (1648)
- Conventionally treated as the start of the modern state system: states govern their own territory, do not interfere in each other's internal affairs, and are separate legal units.
- Truth and reconciliation commission
- A body established after conflict or repression to document what happened and, usually, to prioritise acknowledgement and repair over prosecution.
U
- UDHR
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) — not a treaty, and not legally binding in itself, but the reference point for almost everything that followed.
Resources for this page
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