IB Geography • HL6.1
Geopolitical & Economic Risks
How technological change and global interdependence create risks for individuals, businesses, places and states.
How technological and globalising processes create new geopolitical and economic risks
Hacking, identity theft and surveillance
The same networks that create convenience and opportunity expose personal data, infrastructure and freedoms to new forms of control.
Cyber risk is geographical because exposure, technical capacity and political power are uneven. WannaCry (2017) showed how ransomware could spread across borders and disrupt health services; the Colonial Pipeline attack (2021) connected a digital breach to physical fuel shortages. In Xinjiang, facial recognition, connected cameras and large databases demonstrate how surveillance can reshape state power and individual mobility.
Enquiry 1 — From convenience to control
Map the data, actors and vulnerabilities in one cyber incident, then compare individual, corporate and state risk. Use Xinjiang to evaluate when security becomes surveillance and whether mass monitoring can ever be geographically and ethically justified.
Supply chains transmit disruption
Efficiency depends on specialised suppliers, clustered production and rapid flows—but these same connections create bottlenecks.
The 2011 Thailand floods inundated industrial estates producing automobiles, electronic components and hard drives. Just-in-time systems and supplier concentration meant a physical hazard in one place raised prices and interrupted factories worldwide. Resilience may require inventories, diversified suppliers, nearshoring and better risk mapping, although each sacrifices some efficiency.
Enquiry 2 — Follow the shock
Trace one Thai factory disruption to a distant producer and consumer. Separate hazard, exposure and vulnerability; classify direct and indirect impacts; then recommend three resilience measures and evaluate their costs.
Profit repatriation and tax avoidance
The geography of production and consumption may be very different from the geography of recorded profit and taxation.
TNCs organise subsidiaries, intellectual property and internal payments across jurisdictions. Profit repatriation returns earnings to a parent company; legal tax avoidance differs from illegal evasion, but both raise questions about sovereignty and lost public revenue. The Paradise and Panama Papers made hidden offshore networks visible.
Enquiry 3 — Map where value is created and taxed
For a global firm, trace sales, royalties, reported profit and tax. Compare the perspectives of the company, host state, home state and civil society, then judge whether international coordination can protect national tax sovereignty.
Drones and 3D printing
Technologies change the costs, locations and relationships that organise production and movement.
Drones support logistics, mapping, agriculture, research and disaster response while creating privacy, safety and security risks. Additive manufacturing may reduce inventories and some traded components by moving production nearer to consumers, yet increases flows of data, software and intellectual property. Distance does not disappear; the network changes form.
Enquiry 4 — Is distance becoming less important?
Identify which stages of a supply chain shrink, move or disappear. Construct optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for workers, firms, transport and places, then decide whether disruption reduces interdependence or creates new connections.
Globalisation, nationalism and tension
Uneven benefits, perceived loss of control and identity politics can turn global connection into political resistance.
Sovereignty and uneven places
Migration, deindustrialisation, identity and distrust of distant decision-making combined differently across the UK.
Trade, technology and strategic power
Tariffs and export controls reveal the tension between national security and deeply integrated production networks.
The geography of belonging
Fear, disinformation and polarisation can strengthen in-group loyalty and weaken cooperation across borders.
Paper 3 synthesis
“Globalisation creates nationalism rather than replacing it.” Discuss, linking scale, place, power and perspective. Your answer should distinguish evidence of renewed sovereignty from continued economic interdependence.