Bibliographic record
Abstract
The civil war in Syria has caused the deaths of more than 230,000 civilians and combatants, has led to one of the largest refugee crises in recent memory, and has destabilized the Levant. It therefore represents an extraordinarily challenging foreign policy conundrum. A wide variety of responses—ranging from the imposition of no-fly zones to doing nothing—have been considered in Ottawa and in allied capitals since 2011. Each one, however, raises potentially significant challenges. This article explores how Canada has considered those alternatives. As is systematically the case for a non-great power, Canada’s policy options were shaped more by deliberations in allied capitals—especially Washington—and only thereafter by actual developments in Syria. After laying out Canada’s interests relative to the war in Syria, the article describes four policy alternatives that Canada has faced since 2011, as seen through the lenses of liberal pacifism, liberal interventionism, isolationism, and containment. Among this menu of deeply flawed options, containment has steadily emerged as Canada’s de facto approach. That approach has been correct: it is the least bad course of action available since it best allows Ottawa to protect and promote its interests. Nevertheless, Canada could take additional steps to implement a more comprehensive containment framework.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".