HookFor six days in 2021, one wedged ship froze a tenth of world trade
At 07:40 on 23 March 2021 a 400-metre container ship called the Ever Given, blown sideways by a dust-storm, jammed diagonally across the Suez Canal and did not move for six days. Roughly 12% of all world trade passes through that 193-kilometre ditch, and while the ship sat there an estimated £7 billion of goods a day stopped moving: over 400 vessels queued at both ends, European factories ran short of parts, and coffee, toilet roll and furniture shipments slipped by weeks. One grounded ship, and supply chains on three continents seized up. That is the single most important idea in this topic made visible — the world is not a collection of separate economies but one tightly wired global system, and a shock in one node travels everywhere.
The spec asks you to hold two things in tension. On one side, deepening interdependence: the flows of capital, goods, services, people and information that stitch places together and, for many, raise living standards. On the other, the inequality and injustice those same flows can entrench — who sets the rules of trade, who captures the profit, and who is left carrying the environmental cost. Every question in Global systems and global governance is ultimately about that balance sheet: globalisation connects the world, but it does not connect it equally, and the institutions built to govern it are still catching up.
ModelWhat globalisation actually is — flows, not vibes
Globalisation is the growing integration and interdependence of the world's economies, cultures and populations, driven by increasing cross-border flows. AQA wants you to name the flows precisely: capital (foreign direct investment, portfolio flows, remittances), labour (economic migration, from Polish workers in UK agriculture to Filipino nurses in the Gulf), products and services (physical goods plus outsourced call centres and software), and information (the near-instant, near-free flow of data down fibre-optic cables). These flows have thickened for identifiable reasons, not by magic.
The deepening factors are the examiner's checklist. Financial: deregulation after the 1980s, 24-hour interconnected stock markets, and electronic banking let money move in milliseconds. Transport: containerisation (the standard steel box, introduced from 1956) collapsed the cost of shipping a tonne of goods, while wide-body jets shrank travel time. Communications: undersea fibre-optic cables and the internet made a video call to Mumbai as cheap as one to Manchester. Security and management systems: satellite tracking and 'just-in-time' logistics let a firm coordinate a supply chain spread across twenty countries. Trade agreements: the World Trade Organisation and regional blocs steadily cut tariffs. The strongest answers do not just list these — they show how they compound. Cheap shipping is worthless without the information systems to track the container and the financial systems to pay for it in seconds.
MechanismGlobal systems and interdependence — the wiring diagram
A global system is any set of interlinked parts operating on a worldwide scale. AQA breaks interdependence into four types, and you should be able to give an example of each. Economic: the UK relies on global supply chains for everything from car parts to paracetamol, so a factory shutdown in China raises prices in Birmingham. Political: states pool sovereignty in bodies like the UN and the EU, and a decision in Brussels or Washington reverberates outward. Social: migration builds diaspora communities and flows of remittances — money sent home by migrants — which for countries such as Nepal and the Philippines exceeds 20% of national income and dwarfs foreign aid. Environmental: greenhouse gases emitted anywhere warm the atmosphere everywhere, which is why one nation cannot solve climate change alone.
Interdependence is double-edged, and the mark scheme rewards you for saying so. It can spread prosperity: integration into global trade helped lift hundreds of millions out of poverty in China and Southeast Asia since 1990. But the same wiring transmits shocks and can entrench unequal power relations — the 2008 financial crisis began with US mortgages and became a global recession within months, and it was the poorest workers, not the bankers, who bore the sharpest job losses. Interdependence, in other words, is not the same as equality; a system can be deeply connected and deeply lopsided at once.
CaseTrade, blocs and the transnational machine
International trade has grown far faster than output: world merchandise trade topped £20 trillion in 2022, and its pattern is uneven. High-income economies and a handful of emerging giants (China above all) dominate; many low-income exporters remain locked into selling low-value primary commodities. The classic theory is comparative advantage (David Ricardo, 1817): countries gain by specialising in what they produce relatively most efficiently and trading for the rest. In practice, access to markets is unequal — tariffs, quotas and subsidies (EU and US farm support especially) tilt the pitch against developing-world producers, which is why trade blocs such as the EU, USMCA and ASEAN matter so much: inside the club, barriers fall; outside it, they can rise.
Transnational corporations (TNCs) are the engines of this system. A TNC's spatial organisation typically splits high-value functions (research, design, headquarters, marketing) into rich countries and low-value assembly into low-wage ones, knitting them together with forward and backward linkages. This lets them exploit global differences in labour cost, tax and regulation — and capture most of the value. The commodity case study makes the injustice concrete: the world banana trade.
The banana is the exam's favourite lesson in unequal access to markets. A supermarket banana selling for around 15p typically returns only a penny or two to the plantation worker who grew it, while the retailer, ripener and trading TNC take the lion's share. Production is split between vast, low-cost Latin American plantations (Ecuador, Costa Rica) run by TNCs such as Chiquita, Dole and Fyffes, and small, higher-cost family farms in the Caribbean Windward Islands. From 1993 the EU gave its former colonies preferential, tariff-light access under the 'banana protocol'; the United States, lobbying for Chiquita, challenged this at the WTO, triggering the 'banana wars' — a trade dispute that ran until a settlement in 2012 cut the tariffs and largely opened Europe to the cheaper Latin American fruit. The Windward growers, unable to compete on price, saw exports collapse. The Fairtrade movement is the counter-response: a guaranteed minimum price plus a social premium paid to grower cooperatives, so that more of that 15p stays in the producing community. One fruit lets you evaluate comparative advantage, TNC power, trade governance and ethical alternatives in a single paragraph — which is exactly why it scores.
ModelGlobal governance — who actually writes the rules
Global governance is the framework of norms, laws, institutions and organisations through which the international community tries to regulate problems that cross borders. There is no world government; instead there is a patchwork of intergovernmental organisations (IGOs). The United Nations (founded 1945) provides political and legal architecture — the Security Council, peacekeeping, the International Court of Justice. The World Trade Organisation (1995, successor to the 1947 GATT) sets and polices trade rules. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank (both born at Bretton Woods in 1944) lend to states in crisis and fund development — but attach conditions.
The evaluation examiners look for is the critique of these bodies. Voting power in the IMF and World Bank is weighted by financial contribution, so the wealthiest states dominate; the loan 'conditionalities' of the 1980s and 90s (privatisation, spending cuts) are widely blamed for deepening hardship in parts of Africa and Latin America. The UN Security Council's five permanent members each hold a veto, so action stalls whenever a great power's interest is at stake. Governance also operates across scales — a global agreement (say on carbon) must be implemented by national governments and felt in local places, and it can fracture at any level. The honest conclusion is that global governance has grown impressively since 1945, yet it remains uneven, contested and often skewed toward the powerful who designed it.
CaseThe global commons and Antarctica — governing what nobody owns
The global commons are the parts of the planet that lie beyond any single nation's jurisdiction and, in principle, belong to all humanity: the high seas, the atmosphere, outer space and Antarctica. Their curse is captured by Garrett Hardin's phrase the tragedy of the commons — where a resource is shared and unowned, each user has an incentive to take as much as possible, and collective overuse degrades it for everyone. Fisheries collapse and atmospheric pollution are the classic examples. Antarctica is AQA's set-piece study of how governance can, imperfectly, hold such a tragedy at bay.
Antarctica faces layered threats: climate change (the Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated in 2002; the vast Thwaites Glacier is destabilising), fishing (industrial harvesting of krill, the base of the food web), historic whaling, potential mineral exploitation, growing tourism (well over 70,000 visitors a year pre-pandemic), and the footprint of scientific research itself. Against these stands a genuinely unusual governance regime. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 (12 original signatories, now over 50 parties) froze all territorial claims and reserved the continent for peaceful science. The 1991 Madrid Protocol designated Antarctica a 'natural reserve devoted to peace and science' and banned mining — a ban reviewable only from 2048, which is the tension examiners love. CCAMLR (1982) manages Southern Ocean fishing, the International Whaling Commission enforces the whaling moratorium, and NGOs such as the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition and Greenpeace lobby and monitor. It is the strongest evidence that the commons can be governed — but only by consensus that could unravel when the mineral ban comes up for review.
DataWinners, losers and how to measure the gap
The globalisation critique is the topic's evaluative heart, and a good answer refuses the simple 'globalisation is good/bad' framing. For economies, integration has driven growth and lifted hundreds of millions from poverty, yet it has also hollowed out manufacturing regions in the developed world (the deindustrialised North of England, the US 'Rust Belt') and left some low-income countries dependent on volatile commodity exports. For cultures, the debate is between homogenisation — the spread of Western brands and English, sometimes called 'cultural erosion' — and hybridisation, where global and local fuse into something new ('glocalisation'). For societies and the environment, cheap goods have come at the cost of sweatshop labour, the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed over 1,100 garment workers, and rising carbon emissions from freight. Globalisation, in short, redistributes as much as it grows.
To argue this rigorously you need the AO3 tools to measure inequality. The Lorenz curve plots cumulative share of income against cumulative share of population; the further it bows below the 45-degree line of perfect equality, the more unequal the distribution. The Gini coefficient turns that gap into a single number from 0 (total equality) to 1 (total inequality).
Worked Gini calculation. Suppose a country's households, split into five equal fifths from poorest to richest, earn 4%, 8%, 14%, 24% and 50% of total income. The cumulative income shares are therefore 4%, 12%, 26%, 50% and 100%, against cumulative population shares of 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100%. Using the trapezium method, G = 1 − Σ (change in population share) × (sum of the two consecutive cumulative income shares). Working through the five 0.2-wide strips: 0.2×(0.04+0) = 0.008; 0.2×(0.12+0.04) = 0.032; 0.2×(0.26+0.12) = 0.076; 0.2×(0.50+0.26) = 0.152; 0.2×(1.00+0.50) = 0.300. These sum to 0.568, so G = 1 − 0.568 = 0.43. A Gini of 0.43 signals substantial inequality — comparable to the United States and well above the more equal Nordic economies near 0.28. The examiner's mark is not for the arithmetic alone but for the sentence after it: this figure quantifies exactly the uneven distribution that the globalisation critique describes, turning a value judgement into evidence.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
Paper 2 rewards three assessment objectives: AO1 (knowledge of processes, at a range of scales), AO2 (application to interpret, analyse and evaluate) and AO3 (skills — interpreting the data, maps and graphs stitched into the questions). Match effort to the tariff. The short data-response questions (4 marks: 'analyse the figure') are pure AO3 — quote specific figures, describe the trend AND an anomaly, and do not pad with theory. The 6-mark 'assess' and 9- and 20-mark 'evaluate' essays are where the topic is won.
On the extended essays, the single most common failure is the one-sided answer. AQA's Level 4 descriptor demands a 'balanced, well-evidenced' argument reaching a substantiated conclusion, so plan globalisation questions as a debate — connection versus inequality, winners versus losers — and let named evidence carry each side (the banana trade, remittances to the Philippines, Rana Plaza, the Antarctic Treaty). Attribute your facts: 'over 70,000 tourists a year' and 'the Madrid Protocol, reviewable from 2048' outscore 'lots of tourists' and 'a treaty protects it'. Where a resource, map or graph is provided you must USE it explicitly — application marks in the mid-tariff questions are gated on engaging with the figure, not writing around it. Finish every essay with a genuine judgement that answers the command word ('to what extent', 'evaluate'), not a summary that sits on the fence.