Competition Roundups
A closer look at the 2026 questions, prize results and the kind of argument the competition appears to reward.
The 2026 John Locke Institute Global Essay Prize did not make life easy for writers. Its questions were often only a sentence long: Is democracy in crisis? Should we fear a cashless society? Does Che deserve his iconic T-shirt? Should we be polite to ChatGPT? That brevity is deceptive. The question supplies no reading route, conceptual framework or preferred kind of evidence. Before an entrant can argue well, they must decide what the question is really asking and which interpretation can sustain a precise answer within 2,000 words.
The published results and the limited descriptions made public by winners point toward a consistent standard. Originality was not simply a surprising opinion. It was a way of reorganising the problem. Personalised pricing became a question about private central planning and dispersed knowledge; Che Guevara's T-shirt became a question about what happens when a commercial symbol detaches from the historical person it depicts. The Institute has not yet published the 2026 winning essays themselves, so this review does not pretend to offer close readings that the evidence cannot support. Instead, it asks what the official questions, judging rules, results and winners' own accounts reveal about the kind of thinking that rose to the top.
| Field | 2026 competition |
|---|---|
| Format | Individual essay of no more than 2,000 words |
| Divisions | Junior for entrants under 15; Senior for other eligible entrants under 19 |
| Subject categories | Economics, History, International Relations, Law, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Public Policy, Science & Technology and Theology |
| Entry | Free during the normal entry period; late options carried charges |
| Main recognition | Shortlisting, commendation grades, category prizes and Grand Prizes |
| Judging emphasis | Knowledge, evidence, argument, originality, structure, style and persuasive force |
For the current format, eligibility, dates and official links, see the John Locke Institute Global Essay Prize competition page. The separate John Locke competition guide explains the practical entry process; this article is a retrospective on the 2026 questions and results.
This review was checked on 29 October 2026.
The 2026 results page looks different from the recent archive. Ten subject categories each produced a Senior and Junior first, second and third prize. The Institute then selected a Senior and a Junior Grand Prize winner. In the published 2025 results, Junior appeared as one combined prize group and the senior list covered fewer subjects. In 2026, International Relations, Public Policy and Science & Technology appear alongside the established humanities and social-science fields, while Junior entrants are recognised within every subject.
That is more than an administrative expansion. A younger student writing about personalised pricing is now judged within Economics; one writing about jury trials is judged within Law. “Junior” describes the age group, not a softer, general-purpose essay style.
Mustafa Salman of Lahore Grammar School Johar Town International received the Senior Grand Prize and the Senior Theology first prize. Hesper Lim-Ng of Singapore Chinese Girls' School received the Junior Grand Prize and the Junior Psychology first prize. The official page does not currently publish either Grand Prize essay or identify which of the three questions each writer answered. Their achievements can be reported; their arguments should not be reconstructed from guesswork.
The category first prizes show how geographically dispersed the results were:
| Category | Senior first prize | Junior first prize |
|---|---|---|
| Economics | Nursultan Mukhtaruly | Ayaan Garg |
| History | Yasmin Fatiyeva | Aaira Mavisha |
| International Relations | Soeun Lee | Gabriella Lutz |
| Law | Mohammed Mufti | Nivrithi Nayak |
| Philosophy | Saachi Deshpande | Franco Choon |
| Politics | Abdullah Jawaid | Minjun Gim |
| Psychology | Ava Breston | Hesper Lim-Ng |
| Public Policy | Dhruv Goyani | Ananya Appadwedula |
| Science & Technology | Fatima Mohsin Naqvi | Soojin Kim |
| Theology | Mustafa Salman | Ludovico Prati Lucca Ardizzoni |
The table is useful as a record, but it does not explain why an essay won. For that, the questions and the few public accounts of the work are more revealing.
Several 2026 questions sound as if they could be answered immediately. Most people have an instinct about mandatory vaccination, democracy, free speech, mental-health diagnosis or space exploration. The difficulty is that an instinct is not yet an essay.
The set can be read as four broad kinds of intellectual task.
Some questions demand a normative judgment: should vaccination be mandatory in a public-health emergency, or can doing the right thing for the wrong reason still be wrong? A response needs a principle, but also an account of exceptions and competing duties.
Others ask for causal explanation. Why is the gender ideological gap widening? What effects should widespread personalised pricing produce? These questions punish the easy movement from correlation to cause. A writer must distinguish mechanisms, decide which evidence could separate them and acknowledge explanations that may operate together.
The historical questions include counterfactual and symbolic problems. Imagining a world in which the Library of Alexandria did not burn requires constraints; without them, the essay becomes fiction dressed as history. Asking whether Che deserves his iconic T-shirt sounds lighter, but it forces the writer to decide whether the object represents a person, a political project, a later myth or a consumer identity.
Finally, several questions are really tests of definition. Is free speech the enemy of science? Should we be polite to ChatGPT? What would count as knowing that one had achieved enlightenment? The first paragraph cannot take “speech,” “science,” “politeness” or “knowledge” for granted. The definition determines the argument that follows.
Across all four types, the prompt is short because the entrant is expected to build the intellectual scaffolding. A long introduction that merely describes the topic uses precious space without doing that work.
The 2026 question sheet marks a larger break with the previous structure than the individual prompts initially reveal. In both 2024 and 2025, the Senior competition was organised around seven subjects—Philosophy, Politics, Economics, History, Law, Psychology and Theology—while Junior entrants answered a separate, general set of four questions. In 2026, International Relations, Public Policy and Science & Technology were added, creating ten subject categories. Junior entrants can answer the same category questions as older students and are judged separately within each subject.
This changes the meaning of the Junior award. A younger entrant is no longer writing for a broad Junior pool on a question that might sit between several disciplines. A Junior response on personalised pricing is an Economics essay; one on jury trials is a Law essay; one on vaccination is Public Policy. The age division still affects whom the student competes against, but the intellectual identity of the submission is now set by the subject. For preparation, that makes disciplinary reading more important even at a younger age.
The questions themselves have also moved toward mechanisms. The 2025 set often used a provocative moral statement, a named public figure or a striking quotation to trigger argument. It asked students, for example, to consider political lying, national shame, punishment, self-deception and the relative power of contemporary public figures. The 2026 set retains that appetite for provocation, but many prompts now require a writer to explain a process or predict an effect: what widespread personalised pricing would do, why the gender ideological gap may be widening, how cheap imports affect an economy, what discount rate environmental policy should use, or how determinism would alter criminal sentencing.
That is a meaningful shift. A position is no longer sufficient even as a starting structure. “Personalised pricing is unfair” must become an account of market power, information and consumer response. “Democracy is in crisis” requires the writer to specify which institution, behaviour or measure would demonstrate crisis. The questions invite empirical evidence and causal reasoning without becoming conventional school research assignments.
The three new categories reinforce the same tendency. International Relations asks students to move between states, incentives and distribution. Public Policy makes trade-offs operational: vaccination, environmental discounting and unintended consequences cannot be resolved by moral language alone. Science & Technology uses deceptively simple questions—about free speech, space exploration and politeness toward ChatGPT—to test whether a writer can distinguish scientific practice, technological objects and the human norms surrounding them.
There is also continuity. John Locke questions still use oddness as a diagnostic tool. The Che T-shirt, a libertarian microstate and politeness toward a chatbot all sound slightly playful, but each makes a familiar category unstable: person versus symbol, state versus experiment, tool versus social partner. The competition has not become a policy exam. It still rewards the writer who notices that the wording contains a hidden problem.
The trend worth watching, then, is not simply that the topics are more current. It is that the enlarged question sheet asks students to become more disciplinary and more causal at the same time. Future entrants should identify what kind of evidence their chosen field treats as persuasive, then build the essay around one mechanism or distinction. A clever opinion can open the door; in the 2026 set, it is increasingly the explanation of how something works that carries the argument through it.
Senior Economics winner Nursultan Mukhtaruly has publicly described his essay as Private Central Planning: The Welfare Economics of Widespread Personalised Pricing. He answered the question asking what effects we should expect if technology-enabled personalised pricing becomes widely used.
A predictable response might organise itself around consumer privacy, discrimination, higher profits and the possibility that some buyers receive lower prices. Mukhtaruly's public summary indicates a different frame. He compares AI-driven pricing by large technology companies with private central planning and applies the knowledge problem associated with critiques of planned economies. An algorithm may collect enormous quantities of data, yet still fail to reproduce the dispersed, changing information generated through genuine market exchange.
The analogy does two things. It moves the essay beyond whether a particular price feels fair, and it creates a mechanism that can be tested. If personalised prices are set through increasingly concentrated prediction systems, what information do those systems fail to observe? How do consumers respond once they know prices are tailored? Does the attempt to extract each buyer's maximum willingness to pay reduce the discovery process on which the estimate depends?
This is a useful example of originality under a word limit. “Personalised pricing is unfair” is a position. “Personalised pricing recreates a private version of the knowledge problem in central planning” is an organising proposition. The second claim tells the writer which theories, evidence and objections belong in the essay—and which interesting material must be left out.
The public description does not give us the full reasoning or allow us to assess every step. It does, however, show why an unexpected analogy can be valuable when it generates analysis rather than serving as an impressive opening line.
Senior History winner Yasmin Fatiyeva has also explained her central argument publicly. Her question was: “Does Che deserve his iconic T-shirt?” She concluded that he did not, but not simply because of a judgment on Che Guevara's historical record.
Fatiyeva's account says that the image has moved so far from the man that many buyers are not consuming Guevara at all. They are buying a general feeling of rebellion. Once the symbol circulates independently through fashion and popular culture, the language of whether the historical figure “deserves” it begins to lose its grip.
That reframing changes the evidence an essay needs. A conventional answer might compare Guevara's revolutionary reputation with violence, political repression or policy failures and then issue a moral verdict. A study of the image as a detached commodity has to examine representation, memory, reproduction and the audience's changing relationship with the symbol. The subject remains historical, but the essay becomes partly a history of meaning.
The strength of the idea lies in noticing that the question contains two objects: Che Guevara and “Che” as an image. Treating them as identical would make the essay easier to write but less accurate. Separating them creates the argument.
It is also a warning against confusing contrarianism with originality. A deliberately provocative answer—Che deserves the shirt, or nobody understands the real Che—would not be enough. The interesting move is not the direction of the conclusion. It is the explanation of why the relationship between person and symbol has changed.
The official rules allowed a contestant to submit in multiple categories, with no more than one essay per category. The 2026 results provide a striking example: Abdullah Jawaid won Senior Politics and also received third prize in Senior International Relations.
This does not mean that entering many categories is a sensible default strategy. Each discipline asks different questions of evidence. A political essay may centre institutions, legitimacy or democratic authority; an international-relations essay may need to move between states, incentives, strategic behaviour and global distribution. Reusing one general “critical thinking” template would flatten those differences.
Jawaid's two podium results instead demonstrate that range can be valuable when each essay is allowed to become disciplinary. For most students, one deeply researched submission will be more realistic than several hurried ones. The rule creates freedom, not an obligation to maximise entry count.
The Institute lists seven areas of judgment: knowledge and understanding, competent use of evidence, quality of argumentation, originality, structure, writing style and persuasive force. More revealingly, it says that the best essays are likely to be capable of changing somebody's mind, warns against ignoring the strongest objections and asks entrants to answer the question as precisely and directly as possible.
Those statements suggest three tests that are more useful than a generic checklist.
Can the thesis be expressed as an answer to the exact question, rather than as a description of the surrounding topic? An essay on cashless societies may contain excellent material about payment technology and financial inclusion yet never say what should be feared, by whom or under which conditions.
Directness does not require a yes-or-no thesis. It requires the writer to define any interpretation openly and then remain responsible for answering it. The official FAQ expressly allows an ambiguous question to be interpreted, provided the interpretation is clarified and the answer remains direct.
What is the strongest objection to the argument, not the easiest one to dismiss? A serious essay does not place its weakest opponent in one paragraph near the end. The objection should put pressure on the thesis early enough that the thesis has to become more precise.
For personalised pricing, a strong defence might argue that better price discrimination expands access and allows firms to serve buyers who would otherwise be excluded. For the Che image, an objection might hold that symbols can acquire new meanings without losing the moral responsibility of the person they depict. If the essay cannot survive these versions, it is not ready.
Does the reader understand the problem differently at the end? Persuasion is not the same as rhetorical intensity. Mukhtaruly's publicly described idea moves the reader from consumer fairness to information and coordination. Fatiyeva's moves from the worthiness of a revolutionary to the autonomy of a commercial symbol. Even a reader who rejects the conclusion has been given a more exact disagreement.
That movement is a better measure of originality than whether nobody has expressed the opinion before.
The word limit excludes endnotes, the bibliography, diagrams and tables, but it still forces a compact argument. The practical challenge is not finding enough material. It is deciding what deserves to remain.
Students often begin by collecting sources under broad headings: history, arguments for, arguments against and case studies. When drafting begins, every source feels too valuable to discard. The result becomes a survey with a conclusion attached.
A stronger process reverses the order. Establish the key distinction or mechanism first, then research what would test it. The economics essay needs evidence relevant to information, pricing behaviour and welfare effects because those concepts drive its frame. The history essay needs evidence about the making and circulation of the Che image because the distinction between person and symbol drives its claim.
In 2,000 words, a source must earn its place by doing one of three things: establishing a necessary fact, sharpening the analytical framework or challenging the conclusion. Prestige is not a fourth function. A famous theorist who changes nothing in the reasoning is still a distraction.
The same principle applies to introductions. A cinematic opening, quotation or historical panorama is worthwhile only if the essay returns to it as part of the argument. Otherwise it consumes the space needed for an objection, qualification or piece of evidence.
The official 2026 material allowed large language models to be used to develop thinking and stress-test arguments, but not as a substitute for the human author. The FAQ goes further: it warns that reliance on AI is likely to make an essay resemble thousands of others and states that the safest course is not to use it.
That position is closely connected to the judging criteria. Generative tools are good at producing balanced, fluent coverage. They are also prone to the exact weaknesses that a short competitive essay cannot afford: symmetrical “on the one hand” structures, abstract transitions, safe conclusions and sources arranged after the argument rather than used to transform it.
If a student chooses to use a tool, its most defensible role is adversarial rather than authorial. Ask it to identify a hidden assumption, construct the strongest counterargument, suggest evidence that would disprove the thesis or point out where two definitions are being confused. The student must then verify the material and make every substantive and linguistic decision independently.
The Institute also reserves the right to interview some candidates and requires an academic referee who can verify original authorship. Students should keep research notes, outlines and drafts, not as theatre for an investigation but because a visible thinking process is part of honest academic work.
There is a temptation after results are published to turn every winner into a formula. In this case, the evidence does not permit it. The Institute's Past Essays page currently contains a selection from earlier years, not the 2026 winning set. The 2026 results page supplies names, schools and prize positions, but not judges' comments or winning texts.
We therefore cannot responsibly claim that the Grand Prize winners used a particular structure, number of sources or philosophical tradition. Nor can we compare the prose of the ten category winners from titles and social posts alone. Public summaries are useful evidence of an idea; they are not substitutes for the essay.
This limitation is important for students. Online advice frequently reverse-engineers “what judges want” from incomplete information and turns it into rigid requirements: begin with a provocative hook, cite a certain number of academics, use three counterarguments, or choose an unpopular position. None of those formulas appears in the official criteria.
What the record does support is narrower and more useful. The judges reward direct answers, evidence, originality, structure, persuasive force and engagement with strong objections. The two publicly described first-prize ideas both reorganise their questions around a precise distinction. Beyond that, certainty would be performance rather than analysis.
The official page distinguishes shortlisting, commendation grades, category prizes and the Grand Prize. Shortlisted entrants receive an eCertificate; the results page also congratulates students who received High Commendation or Very High Commendation. First, second and third prizes are awarded within each category and division, and the overall Grand Prize carries an honorary Junior Fellowship and a scholarship toward Institute programmes.
The Institute does not publish individual feedback and has not provided an official percentile for every commendation grade. Families should be cautious with precise percentages circulated by tutoring providers or social posts unless the Institute confirms them.
Attendance at the London academic conference or prize ceremony was not required in order to win. The competition itself was free during its standard entry period, while the conference and dinner were separate paid activities. That distinction matters: academic recognition should not be confused with the ability to purchase travel or attend an event.
A shortlist or commendation is meaningful evidence that an essay advanced in a very large international field. It is not a guarantee of admissions advantage, just as a non-shortlisted result is not proof that the research was wasted. The most durable outcome is a piece of writing the student can defend, revise and learn from.
The first task is not choosing a side. It is writing down what each important word in the question could mean. If “polite” behaviour toward ChatGPT has value, is that value owed to the machine, to the person practising a habit, or to other humans affected by the interaction? Each answer produces a different essay.
Next, narrow the mechanism. “Democracy has many problems” is too large. A claim about whether declining trust, executive power, information systems or party competition constitutes a crisis can be tested. “Space exploration brings benefits” is also too broad. A writer might examine whether necessity should be defined through direct survival, scientific spillovers, long-term risk or public purpose.
Then look for the most serious objection before drafting a polished introduction. If the objection destroys the thesis, that is useful progress. Change the thesis. The official criteria do not reward a student for remaining loyal to an early idea.
Finally, edit for intellectual function. Every paragraph should define, support, test, qualify or advance the argument. Background that merely demonstrates reading should be cut. So should elegant sentences whose removal makes no difference to the reasoning.
The 2026 winners whose ideas are publicly visible did not make their questions bigger. They found the smaller question hidden inside and followed it far enough to alter the reader's view.
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