Commonwealth diplomacy: transcending colonial and post-colonial ghosts?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Does the fact that Commonwealth membership criteria now focus not only on a historic constitutional association with an existing Commonwealth member but on the respect of the Commonwealth’s core values—rule of law, democracy, human rights, human development—mean that all British imperial ghosts have been banished from the Organisation? Has the true transformation from the British Commonwealth to the Commonwealth of Nations really occurred? The emergence of Canada as an increasingly influential developed member in the Organisation, the affirmation of South-South diplomacy and the establishment of a successful Secretariat, based in London but apparently free from British dominance, seem to prove the point. Yet many of the values, institutions and modes of working of the Commonwealth are indebted to the British past of the vast majority of its members. This article will attempt to address these issues by focusing on the ambivalence at the heart of the Commonwealth’s diplomatic dynamics: while Commonwealth identity was built against British dominance and while the leaders of the new Commonwealth nations in the post-independence era strove to make it the negation of empire, the Commonwealth has kept alive a number of ideals that do seem to emanate from Britain. But the presence of ghosts does not necessarily mean that the Commonwealth is a form of neo-colonialism, even in disguise, as a comparison with the French post-colonial model might show. Ultimately, the objective here is to assess to what extent the Commonwealth has transformed colonial and post-colonial relations into a fully evolved form of multilateral diplomacy between independent States.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".