The utility of symbols : the relationship between symbols and legitimacy in international relations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My thesis will demonstrate that symbols matter in international relations because of the way they can influence legitimacy. Joseph Nye has argued, “cooperation is a matter of degree” in international relations (Nye 2004, 29); legitimacy is one of the factors that determines the extent to which the international community will cooperate with a given action. Thomas Franck (1990) argues that legitimacy, too, is a matter of degree. This means that actions are not always judged to be strictly legitimate or illegitimate, but rather, they fall on a spectrum somewhere between the two extremes. The puzzle, however, is how states calculate the degree of legitimacy of an action. I argue that symbols have an important role to play in this calculation of the extent to which an action is seen as legitimate. This thesis will further explore the role and power of symbols in international relations, a role that the literature on legitimacy has not thoroughly discussed. I will use two case studies, Canada’s refusals to endorse Operation Iraqi Freedom and Ballistic Missile Defence, to demonstrate that symbols are a source of power in international relations. The American administration went to significant lengths to try to obtain a Canadian endorsement of these initiatives because it knew that this endorsement would contribute to the perceived legitimacy of these actions. The degree to which an action is seen as legitimate can influence the extent to which the international community will cooperate with it, or at least not resist it. I conclude that this argument has implications for Canadian foreign and defence policy, and that the literature regarding legitimacy should better reflect this power of symbols in international relations.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".