Coming of age in academia: Canadian International Relations and the “optimistic interregnum” of the 1990s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Taking the view of International Relations (IR) as a socio-intellectual space conditioned by historical circumstances, and drawing on my personal reflections on international politics in the 1990s as a particularly important influence on my own professional and intellectual path in IR, this paper explores the 1990s as an exceptional period that shaped the decline of Canadian Foreign Policy as a field of study in Canadian IR. Bookended by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, at the beginning, and the start of the War on Terror at its finale, the 1990s can be read as an “optimistic interregnum” during which new possibilities arose for an inclusive, global transnationalism and the global governance of important problems. New ideas and new ways of conceptualizing IR through a global lens emerged. For Canadian students of IR in the 1990s, outward-looking globalism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and theoretical eclecticism fit with the hopeful optimism of the times. In contrast, CFP—with its attendant requisite of policy relevance in service of Canadian national priorities—seemed inward-looking, parochial, and on the sidelines of important new intellectual currents and analyses.
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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 | 0.016 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.069 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.039 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".