Prime-Time Saviors: The West Wing and the Cultivation of a Unilateral American Responsibility to Protect
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Television programs and films are powerful visual mediums that inject various interpretations about law into the public stream of consciousness and can help shape public perception on various issues. This Article argues that the popular television series The West Wing (“TWW”) cultivated the notion of a unilateral American legal obligation to intervene and protect vulnerable populations from genocide in the context of a fictional African state by mimicking some of the factual circumstances that transpired during the Rwandan genocide. In creating an idealized vision of an American response to such humanitarian crises, the show effectively attempted to re-imagine Rwanda as a beneficiary of United States military force. This Article argues that in advancing a radical vision of unilateral humanitarian military interventions, TWW questionably propagated metaphors and caricatures that persist in human rights discourse as criticized by Makau Mutua - namely that Western states must act as saviors rescuing vulnerable and victimized third world populations from malevolent third world dictatorships. Furthermore, such caricatures deny non-Western populations a certain subjectivity and foster the idea that Western states must always come to the rescue. In addition, these caricatures paint the international community and fellow Western states like France as unwilling or unable to respond to such crises. Lastly, this Article proposes alternative visions of how TWW might have presented responses to humanitarian crises by incorporating the international community and giving greater voice to local resistance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".