Mark French is a Public Administration student at Tarleton State University headed into investor-state dispute law. He works in finance and tracks the macro-economic and geopolitical forces that determine how much control a state keeps over its own economy — the question this brief is built around.
Thesis/Claim: Modern economic sovereignty erodes not by conquest but by consent: states pre-commit to legal-financial mechanisms—investor-state arbitration, IMF / World Bank conditionality, and sovereign-debt architecture—that bind their future policy autonomy, and the fiscal-emergency case tests whether that consent can hold a state against its own survival.