Essay prompts, by level

International Relations

In the world two neighboring countries share a river. One needs it for farming and the other needs it for hydropower. If you had to design a fair sharing rule from scratch, what would it look like and why is water so hard to divide fairly between nations?

Politics

Suppose your class elects a "Prime Minister" with binding power over the whole class for a month. What powers would you give them? and what would you deliberately withhold to stop things going wrong?

Economics and Modern World

If your family had to leave your home forever because the sea was slowly swallowing your town, what's the one object you'd take and what do you think the world owes people who lose their homes to something they didn't cause?

History

The Non-Aligned Movement was founded in 1961 on the idea that newly independent nations shouldn't have to pick a side between superpowers. That founding logic collapsed with the Cold War. However, in today's world, again split between competing blocs (the US, China, and a resurgent multipolar order), looks similar to the one NAM was built to navigate. Is Non-Alignment a genuinely useful framework for smaller states like Bangladesh to revive today or was it always a Cold War-specific idea that doesn't survive being repurposed?

International Relations

From your perspective, how impactful do you think the UN is in resolving global issues? What are the loopholes the system has, and how do you think they can be resolved? Add your own idea from scratch on how you think the system could be redesigned in order to ensure world order.

Economics and Modern World

In Bangladesh, a university degree is widely seen as the surest route out of poverty. Yet graduate unemployment has been rising for years, while industries complain they cannot find workers with the right skills. Across the world, economists are asking the same uncomfortable question: is a traditional university education still the most valuable thing a young person can invest in, or has the world changed faster than the education system has? If you were redesigning education spending for a country like Bangladesh from scratch, what would you fund, what would you cut, and how would you measure whether it was working?

History

Although the Mughals(1526–1857) and the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) collapsed decades apart under different immediate pressures their declines are deeply interlinked through shared structural vulnerabilities, global economic shifts and the rise of European imperial hegemony. How do you think their falls could have been prevented through sharp strategies? And does that same lesson apply to any state or institution today?

Politics

Suppose from tomorrow, Bangladesh sets a ban on student politics. How do you think this will affect Bangladesh's civil norms, political environment and overall people's lifestyle? Is banning student politics solving the problem or hiding it? Design a model that keeps student political energy alive without the violence.

International Relations

Myanmar's 1982 Citizenship Law stripped the Rohingya of their statehood and citizenship is the foundation beneath freedom of movement, political participation and legal protection, none of which repatriation alone can restore. And even after nine years into this crisis, Bangladesh is in no position to fix Myanmar's internal politics. Design a framework that goes beyond simple repatriation. Something that could realistically move this stalemate forward.

Politics

The 1996 Ganges Water Treaty between Bangladesh and India expires in 2026. The Teesta water-sharing agreement, initiated in 2011, has never been signed. Fifteen years of diplomatic stalemate on one, and a renegotiation deadline on the other arriving almost simultaneously. Imagine you are a senior analyst at Bangladesh's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Minister has asked you for a realistic strategy on what Bangladesh can actually achieve in terms of water diplomacy, and how, when the country sitting across the table is twelve times your size, controls the upstream flow, and has its own domestic politics to manage. What do you say?

Economics and Modern World

Driven by heavy borrowing for infrastructure megaprojects, Bangladesh's total external debt surged to nearly $105 billion by the end of 2024. The long grace periods on these bilateral loans secured from China, Russia and India are rapidly expiring, meaning the government is now forced to repay large principal amounts alongside high interest. The fiscal strain is acute: in the first two months of FY2025-26, 89% of all newly acquired foreign loans were consumed entirely by servicing older debts. Design a radical, five year macroeconomic policy that breaks this cycle of borrowing to pay off old loans. How must the state fundamentally restructure its domestic tax revenue generation to ensure that foreign funded infrastructure does not bankrupt the national treasury?

History

At its peak, the East India Company was not a government. It was a commercial enterprise that ended up administering a subcontinent, raising an army of over 200,000 soldiers, collecting taxes from millions of people, and waging wars on its own authority. It did not conquer Bengal through ideology or nationalism. Today, private entities - technology platforms, financial institutions, logistics networks exercise a kind of structural power over governments and populations that does not require armies or flags through debt trap, infrastructure exploitation. Was the action of the East India Company done to Bengal a uniquely historical crime or is it a template that keeps being reinvented in new forms? In answering, identify at least one specific mechanism the Company used and trace honestly whether its equivalent exists anywhere in the world today.