The task (NB Keep in mind that this essay is only 2,300 words long)
In this essay, you will conduct a comparative analysis of an international public institution’s and an international NGO’s engagement with the ‘macro issue’ in the right-hand list on page 17. You can build on/expand the particular micro issue you worked on for the media analysis, or you can work on a different aspect of the macro issue. Your focus, however, must be transnational: not just one country and not considering issues solely as they impact on and between nation-states, but also as they impact on particular populations across national borders (e.g. indigenous populations or racial minorities, urban or rural poor, small or medium-sized businesses, women, cultural or religious communities, migrant/mobile workers and professionals, and so on), and/or political/civil society dynamics in transnational context.
You should also ensure that you do not cast your focus too broadly, but pick one or two aspects of the issue that you would like to consider: they could be (depending on your chosen issue) in the areas of politics, society, economy, environment, trade, security, armed conflict, culture, language, religion, ethnicity, human rights, and so on; they could be considered at a global or regional level, or at the level of issues that involve two or more countries in a specific relationship (e.g. cross- border cultural, trade or ethnic politics). But you need to keep your focus contained, hence the possibility of simply expanding on your topic chosen for the media analysis.

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Choice of organisations

It is desirable that the two organisations have some sort of connection, such as one working with or lobbying the other, or one (usually the NGO) being critical of the other’s actions or stance. They certainly should be working on the same aspects of the broader issue that you choose to treat. That said, you have many possibilities for your choice.

For the institution, you can choose:

• the UN and its main bodies (General Assembly, ECOSOC, Security Council, International Court of Justice), and its various agencies such as UN Women, FAO, WHO, ILO, UNHRC, UNHCR, UNDP, UNICEF, UNCTAD.
• an international or regional economic alliance such as WTO, IMF, World Bank, the G7, G8, G20, G77, NAFTA, OPEC, APEC, OECD.
• or cultural/religious alliance such as the Organisation of the Islamic Cooperation
• a regional military or political treaty organisation such as NATO, ASEAN, Organisation of
  American States.
• a particular institution or agency of supranational entities such as the EU (e.g. European Commission, European Economic and Social Council, European Central Bank, European Ombudsman), or the recently-constituted Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), modelled on the EU.

        •       For the purpose of this exercise, you may also consider philanthropic offshoots of corporations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or Business for Millenium Development, as ‘institutions’ rather than as NGOs.
For the NGO, you have close to unlimited possibilities. Corporations and their philanthropic foundations are excluded, but small business advocacy groups, or cooperatives, are allowable. Political parties are also excluded, but trade union confederations and church- based charities are allowable. Loose networks that are not formally constituted as NGOs but that act as transnational advocacy and lobby groups are also allowed. Your NGO must, however, have transnational connections, either because it is internationally constituted (such as Greenpeace, Amnesty, Médecins sans Frontières, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and so on), or because it is internationally networked through an umbrella organisation or informal transnational alliance.
Writing the essay
You will make a critical comparative assessment of your two chosen organisations’ approach to the issue in question, and the political values and/or cultural assumptions informing this approach. How do they frame the issue? Is this framing consistent with the stated philosophy of the organisations, as ascertained via their websites, charter, etc? What sort of cultural and symbolic capital are they moblising in their communicative and persuasive strategies? Your analysis will draw on some of the theoretical or epistemological approaches you have encountered this semester. Your analysis can also draw on both quantitative and qualitative data (e.g. UN human development indicators, CIA fact sheets, national census data and so on for the former, and case studies and so on for the latter).

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