The Obama Charm? Canada and Afghanistan Under a New US Administration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the evolution – or lack thereof – in Canada's commitments to Afghanistan in light of Barack Obama's election to the US presidency. Obama's victory, certainly popular in Canada, signaled a renewed focus on Afghanistan as a priority for the American war on terror. For allies who were reluctant to participate, either at all or more extensively, in the war on terror because of their concerns over the administration of George W. Bush, the Obama election effectively removed all obstacles. In framing the discussion on the evolution (or not) of Canada's role in Afghanistan since the Obama victory, the article returns to the traditional understanding of Canada's role and place in world affairs – notably, to the concept of the middle power. In so doing, the article posits two understandings of middlepowermanship and argues that the Canadian intervention in Afghanistan can be seen through both interpretations. Framed as a peacekeeping or development mission, it coincides with the Canadian nation-building project and helps to reinforce a social order built upon the presumption of Canada's inherent moral superiority on the world stage. Framed as an action to reinforce the good of the existing global order, Canada's participation in the Afghanistan mission can be seen as representing the (global) “common interest.” The tensions around these two lenses through which Canada's middlepowermanship can be seen to characterize the first Obama year of the Canada–United States relationship on Afghanistan. Whatever the eventual decision of the Canadian government with respect to its intervention in Afghanistan, middlepowermanship will continue to loom large.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".