Note: Written in March 2024 for a Southeast Asian Economics course at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy — the second policy paper I submitted for the course that quarter, the first being on digital trafficking. Wildlife trafficking generates an estimated $7-10 billion annually and is deeply entangled with poverty, corruption, and the same criminal networks behind other forms of illegal trade. The paper argues that enforcement-only approaches are not only ins

Note: Written in February 2024 for a Southeast Asian Economics course at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy. The paper examines what the UN has called a global crisis: people trafficked across Southeast Asia and forced to run online scams — the same scams that flood inboxes daily. The analytical focus is on regulatory gaps and the Cambodia-Malaysia comparison. I've kept the policy register of the original paper intact; this is not a subject that benefits from

Written in fall 2023 for a Politics of Southeast Asia course during my graduate studies in International Affairs. The paper argues that the dominant US-China binary in Southeast Asian geopolitics obscures a third and historically rooted actor: India. The argument begins in antiquity — with the Indianization of Southeast Asian kingdoms — and ends in the present, where India's Act East Policy and partnership-based approach gives it leverage neither superpower can replicate. Leg