Four arguments
I'm prepared to defend.

Extended Essay · IB

The Costs of Unaccountability: Clearview AI, Market Failure, and the Political Economy of Surveillance

Facial-recognition markets can't be fixed by the regulation we have, only by regulation aimed at a different layer. The essay applies three analytic frameworks to make that case, arguing the markets persist as failures through a compounding failure of economics and political accountability: Pigou's negative externality theory (the social costs of wrongful arrests and racial bias are borne by unconsenting third parties invisible to the transaction), Lukes' three-dimensional power model (companies shape not just procurement decisions but the regulatory agenda and public perception of surveillance as inevitable), and Bradford's Brussels Effect (EU standards achieved market exclusion rather than global norm convergence: Clearview routed around enforcement through deliberate jurisdictional exit).

The core claim: the market failure Clearview AI represents persisted not because it was unidentifiable (the EU formally named the same harms the US Congress acknowledged and ignored) but because the state was simultaneously the technology's largest buyer and its only potential regulator, a structural conflict of interest that existing regulatory frameworks were not designed to address.

SSRN Preprint · Abstract 6187979

The Paradox of Control: How US Semiconductor Export Restrictions Are Reshaping China's Technological Sovereignty

Export controls on semiconductors behave like industrial policy for the country being restricted. The "creative insecurity" hypothesis holds that this kind of geopolitical pressure on a country's technology sector functions as de facto industrial policy, forcing domestic innovation rather than merely restricting trade. This preprint tests that claim against China's semiconductor industry, using production capacity, trade flows, and innovation data from 2018 to 2025, with projections to 2033.

Math IA · IB

Logistic Regression Modeling of G20 Trade Retaliation Patterns

Trade retaliation looks like it should have structure you can model. Using 25 tariff escalation episodes between G20 members from 2011 to 2021, I modeled the probability that a tariff triggers retaliation with two predictors: the Trade Intensity Index and the Trade Complementarity Index. Complementarity looked like the stronger predictor, but the coefficients were unstable: they shifted with small changes to the sample, and with only 25 cases the data couldn't carry the weight I'd put on it. The model's limits became the finding, showing where trade data stops and diplomatic negotiation takes over.

Global Politics IA · HL

Coalition Politics, Budgets, and the Implementation of Berlin's BEK 2030

Berlin's climate programs don't fail from lack of money; they fail because a coalition can quietly deprioritize them without ever voting to kill them. Tests whether Berlin's BEK 2030 climate mandates are failing more from coalition politics or financial constraints, using Keith Dowding's collective action framework and research on status-quo bias in climate governance, through interviews moving from federal to local: a senior BMUKN official, a Klima-Allianz Deutschland policy officer, and the district councilor for Mitte. All three converged on the same answer from different angles: funding shortfalls are usually downstream of a prior political choice, not the cause of one. Berlin's updated BEK 2030 has sat unadopted by the Abgeordnetenhaus since 2022 over coalition opposition, and the 2026/27 budget cut roughly €85 million from BENE2, the city's district-level climate program, partly, per the Mitte councilor, to keep parking spaces instead of converting them into rainwater-absorbing green space.