`World Opinion' and the Founding of the UN: Governmentalizing International Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While `world opinion' is a staple in political discourse, the concept has received little attention in IR. Locating it along the `realist—idealist' divide, existing studies have conceptualized `world opinion' empirically, as an aggregative or intersubjective phenomenon, annexed or opposed to state sovereignty, and embodying a normative standard. Drawing on Luhmann's conception of public opinion and Foucault's governmentality approach, this article reconceptualizes `world opinion' discursively (functionally and semantically), as a medium of communication that enables post-sovereign forms of international governance irrespective of an inherent normativity. The alternative conception of `world opinion' is illustrated in the discourse of the emerging United Nations in the early 1940s. In this context, `world opinion' addressed problems concerning the failure of the League of Nations, total war, and threats to `civilization'. With public opinion research as a technical backdrop, `world opinion' underwrote governmentalities of international policing, welfare and rights liberalism, post-colonial pastoralism, and pedagogical panopticism in response to these problems.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".