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` PIR-10038 Why Politics Matter

SECTION A

1. Does politics only take place in certain places? If so, why?

Doing politics is performing a political act, intended to have an effect on the established social order. It has an impact on your life, like the chances you get at the start. It also influences you personally in the way you define yourself, in the way you take position among society, and in the way you interact with the others. Politics affects you and everyone around you.
When something can have such an impact on one’s life, it is important to be able to determine and control its sources. Where does politics happen? Is it confined to institutions of government, reserved to politicians? Or can it happen else where? It depends on the definition you assign to politics.

Politics is, in a first place, meant to happen within the institutions of the State.
As a matter of fact, politicians perform political acts. Once elected, they take decisions affecting the entire society, they model society. It is mainly the institutions of the State’s goal to do politics. For example, after the second World War, millions of people found themselves without a home, wandering aimlessly through a destroyed Europe. “Nations came together in the stately Swiss city of Geneva and codified binding, international standards for the treatment of refugees and the obligation of countries towards them”. It resulted in the signing of the 1951 Convention, a leading legal instrument for refugee protection. This was the fruit of tough international political negotiations between governments, but proves that politicians and
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governments do politics affecting the all of society, and sometime as in this example, at a supranational level.
The idea of a cooperation between the States, the relation they can have, is primordial to the question “where does politics happen”. Indeed, G. Peters establishes his definition of politics on this