Global politics names both the discipline that studies the political and economical patterns of the world and the field that is being studied. At the centre of that field are the different processes of political globalization in relation to questions of social power.

The discipline studies the relationships between cities, nation-states, shell-states, multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations and international organizations. Current areas of discussion include national and ethnic conflict regulation, democracy and the politics of national self-determination, globalization and its relationship to democracy, conflict and peace studies, comparative politics, political economy, and the international political economy of the environment. One important area of global politics is contestation in the global political sphere over legitimacy.

It can be argued that global politics should be distinguished from the field of international politics, which seeks to understand political relations between nation-states, and thus has a narrower scope. Similarly, international relations, which seeks to understand general economic and political relations between nation-states, is a narrower field than global politics.
global issue describes any global social, economic, political or environmental problem that has already arisen or can arise from global change or globalization, e.g. overpopulation, or water scarcity.

In their book "Global Issues", Hite and Seitz emphasize that global issues are qualitatively different from international affairs and that the former arise from growing international interdependencies which makes the issues themselves interdependent.