Eroding the Middle Ground: The Shift in Foreign Policy Underpinning South African Nuclear Diplomacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In international relations states labelled as ‘middle powers’ are often responsible for crafting a middle way to bridge conflicting international interests. They typically favour multilateralism and cooperative international behaviour. Middle power diplomacy has played a crucial role in the establishment and maintenance of the nuclear non-proliferation regime. South Africa has played the role of a middle power in nuclear diplomacy since 1994, drawing on its moral position after giving up its nuclear weapons. This role has especially involved joining the efforts of middle powers in the North, such as Norway and Canada, to indefinitely extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). However, South Africa's foreign policy has shown a gradual shift away from a middle power orientation not least due to an increasing non-aligned position that calls for deep reforms to the perceived unfair world order tilted in the favour of the developed North. This shift is also visible in South African nuclear diplomacy and is eroding the middle ground that has so far sustained the non-proliferation regime. The paper argues that South Africa's middle power diplomacy has allowed it to punch above its weight in the nuclear realm, but its pursuit of international reforms has resulted in the drawing of a fault line between developed and developing countries. It is in the interest of nuclear non-proliferation to regain the middle ground by forming broad coalitions amongst all actors interested in nuclear disarmament.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".