Simon Birrer
I'm a Master's student in Political Science with a focus on International Relations and a minor in Japanese Studies at the University of Zurich. My work sits where comparative politics, East Asian security, and computational methods meet. In political science it runs from parliaments at home to security questions in East Asia, asking how each adapts under pressure.
Iran Escalation Dashboard
A public tracker of military and diplomatic actions involving Iran, built from English-language news coverage: articles are scored against a fixed rubric, clustered into events with aggregated media links, and rolled up into an escalation index across five conflict axes.
Live data, exported from the ingestion pipeline's database on every scheduled run.
Open the dashboardWritten works
Papers, policy notes, and essays on East Asian security, Iran, and Swiss politics, written in English, German, and Japanese. Most recent work:
- June 2026The Influence of US Foreign Policy on East Asian Security Strategies: A Comparative Analysis of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan
- January 2026Realism vs. Constructivism in Explaining the 2023 Saudi–Iran Rapprochement: Power, Identity and Ripeness