Politics: should I choose it?

Power and national political actors

Power and global political actors

Issues for Australia's democracy

Global challenges to democracy

Unit 3 AoS1 - Global issues, global responses

You select from four global issues — climate change, global economic instability, development, and weapons of mass destruction — and build a case file on it. The study design points you towards short-term causes, meaning drivers from roughly the last ten years, so a treaty from the 1990s is background rather than a cause. You then examine how global interconnectedness through trade, supply chains, migration, digital communication and a shared atmosphere has both intensified the issue and made coordinated responses possible. Responses are traced across three levels: individual states, institutions of global governance such as the United Nations and its agencies, and non-state actors including NGOs, corporations and transnational movements. International law is assessed for what it can and cannot compel, and you weigh the challenges blocking resolution — sovereignty, competing national interests, enforcement gaps — before judging the consequences for global political stability or change.

Unit 3 AoS2 - Contemporary crises: conflict, stability and change

Crises come in three forms here: human rights crises, armed conflict, and the mass movement of people. Whichever you study, the analytical core is perspective — the same crisis looks entirely different from the capital of a party to the conflict, from a neighbouring state absorbing refugees, from the Security Council, and from an aid organisation on the ground. You map those competing perspectives and show how each actor's interests shape what it is willing to do. Responses are examined at state, institutional, regional-grouping and non-state level, with diplomacy and international law treated as the two formal resolution processes, including their limits when a veto is exercised or a state refuses jurisdiction. You then assess the ability of actors to respond effectively — capacity, mandate and political will are three different things — and trace the consequences for political stability or change.

Unit 4 AoS1 - Power and the national interest

You commit to one Indo-Pacific state — China, Japan, India, Indonesia or the United States — and study how it pursues its interests in the region. The four national interests are fixed by the study design: security, economic prosperity, regional relationships and regional standing, and you should be able to say which one a given action primarily serves. Power is broken into political, economic, military, diplomatic and cultural forms, while the instruments through which that power is exercised are diplomacy, trade and foreign aid. The real work is judgement: how effective has this state been in achieving each interest, what has obstructed it, and what have its actions meant for other actors in the region. You finish by weighing its contribution to regional stability or to regional change, which are not the same outcome and often pull against each other.

Unit 4 AoS2 - Australia in the Indo-Pacific

This area of study turns the same framework on Australia. The four national interests recur, but here you must handle perspective from both directions: how Australian governments define the national interest, and how partners and neighbours read Australian behaviour, which are frequently at odds over aid conditions, climate policy or security agreements. You study Australia's relationships with three states, at least one of which must be a Pacific Islands Forum member and the other two drawn from elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific, and you follow Australia's response to a regional issue or crisis through to its outcome. Cooperation and conflict are treated as two possible results of the same relationship, so evidence of both belongs in your notes on each partner. The closing judgement is what Australia's conduct contributes to political stability or change across the region.