This year’s John Locke Essay Competition posed some of the most academically challenging questions for students. One of the most significant changes to the John Locke Essay Competition this year is the introduction of International Relations (IR) as a standalone category, which we discussed further here. Standing out for its focus on real-world global dilemmas, the International Relations category requires students to think critically about the significant themes of economics, ethics, and power.
With the numerous ways to approach each topic, it is easy to get overwhelmed, even just with deciding where to begin. We will go into details about the 2026 International Relations questions and strategies to answer the questions.
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John Locke Essay Competition International Relations Question 1: Does foreign aid help or hurt poor people?
What the question is asking: Students have the opportunity to evaluate the real impact of foreign aid on poverty. This question challenges students to examine the mechanisms by which aid operates on the ground. Consider whether aid improves long-term outcomes for individuals or merely creates dependency and distorts local economies, ultimately leading to state incompetence.
How to approach the question:
First, students should be able to clearly distinguish between different types of aid and how each of these operates. The central analytical framework is to contrast the positive and negative effects of foreign aid on the ground. Emergency humanitarian relief, long-term development funding, budget support to governments, and conditional loans each function differently and carry different risks. On the positive side, students should consider the tangible impacts of aid in areas like vaccination programs, emergency famine relief, and public health. On the negative side, there are aids that can distort local markets, create dependency, and undermine domestic governance.
The deeper analytical challenge concerns second-order effects, which consider the interests and conduct of the donor nation as another layer to the issue. Does providing aid, at its core, primarily serve strategic or political interests? In some cases, aid may be used to influence the policies of recipient nations, potentially reducing their autonomy. To examine beneath the surface, answering this question also identifies who truly benefits.
Q2: Is the US economy harmed by cheap imports from China?
What the question is asking: This question asks students to analyze the economic trade-offs of globalization, focusing specifically on the relationship between the United States and China. It challenges students to consider whether low-cost imports benefit the overall economy in the long term or disproportionately introduce harm to certain marginalized groups.
How to approach the question:
A strong response will be preceded by identifying the key stakeholders: consumers, workers, and businesses. Cheap imports from China have demonstrably lowered the cost of a wide range of goods, expanding purchasing power for millions of households in the U.S. At first glance, this appears largely beneficial. But at the same time, import competition has contributed to the erosion of manufacturing employment in specific regions, with consequences for communities that depend on those industries for wages and economic identity. These losses carry consequences well beyond income, affecting community identity and social cohesion.
Students should explore how these effects are unevenly distributed and how benefits and consequences are felt concurrently across different areas. The most common error students make on this question is arguing at the national level when the interesting tensions are regional and distributional. For example, manufacturing workers in certain regions may bear the costs of import competition, while consumers nationwide benefit from lower prices. Students should also explore what a significant reduction in Chinese imports might look like in practice, particularly in lower-income American communities where cheap consumer goods provide disproportionate value.
Q3: Should a coalition of countries (or billionaires) run a libertarian microstate experiment?
What the question is asking: Of the three questions, this is the most philosophically open-ended, and it is the one most likely to produce either genuinely original essays or badly confusing ones. This probes the ethical and political implications of creating experimental societies. A libertarian microstate is likely to minimize government intervention, emphasizing individual freedom and free markets. The question asks whether it is ethically acceptable to test such a system in practice, especially when real people’s lives are involved.
How to approach the question:
Students should begin by first defining what a libertarian microstate is and examining the purpose behind pursuing such an experiment. Should humans be really used in a social experiment for the potential benefit of others, even if they consent to participate? This connects to deep questions in political philosophy about the limits of consent, as well as the difference between a genuine community and a controlled trial. Ultimately, who bears the risk if the experiment fails matters largely.
Students should also engage with historical precedents rather than treating the concept as novel. Puritan New England was, in a meaningful sense, an attempt to build a society from first principles, founded by people who had actively chosen to participate under harsh conditions.
Strong essays will not only draw from history; they will also examine who is doing the experimenting in a contemporary context. A coalition of sovereign states pursuing a libertarian charter city operates within recognizable frameworks of international law and democratic accountability. A group of private individuals doing the same raises structurally different concerns about legitimacy, coercion, and the relationship between wealth and political power. The best essays will take a clear position on whether such an experiment is ethically defensible and structurally viable, and defend that position against the strongest available objections.
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General Tips for the Science and Technology Category
Focus on the scale of analysis: IR questions can look entirely different depending on the level at which they are examined. What helps a country’s GDP may devastate a specific town; what benefits consumers in aggregate may destroy livelihoods in a particular community. The best essays are explicit and consistent about which level they are arguing at and do not quietly switch between them when it becomes convenient. If your argument depends on an aggregate, name the people it leaves out.
Think distributionally: A recurring trap in IR essays is to argue about effects on the economy or the country as if these were uniform and static. The most sophisticated answers break down who wins and who loses, how these changed them if at all, and take that disaggregation seriously rather than averaging it away.
Distinguish empirical disputes from value disputes: Several of this year’s questions mix factual uncertainty with genuine value disagreements, and strong essays keep these separate. Whether aid measurably reduces poverty is, in principle, an empirical question. Whether it is acceptable for a donor nation to attach conditions to aid is a normative question, and no amount of data will settle it. Essays that collapse these two kinds of disagreement tend to argue past themselves. Being explicit about which parts of an argument rest on facts and which rest on values is not a weakness; it is a mark of analytical maturity.
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John Locke Essay Competition Prep
In the John Locke Essay Competition Prep course, students will learn the ins and outs of essay writing, in preparation for entering the competition. We offer prep classes in all categories. Students will choose one topic, compose an original thesis and argument, and write an essay for submission. Students will engage in a guided analysis of primary and secondary sources, develop critical thinking skills, and discover interesting insights. In addition to the group classes, students will receive guidance on their individual projects from the instructor through one-on-one sessions.
