The paradigm that dare not speak its name: Canadian Foreign Policy’s uneasy relationship with realist IR theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the place that “realism” occupies in the debates over International Relations theory and Canadian Foreign Policy. Argued here is the claim that realism is far from being a dominant paradigm in the Canadian academy, which in itself is hardly a surprising finding. However, realism’s relative absence from the scholarship on Canadian Foreign Policy disguises a more important finding: there has been a fairly longstanding Canadian approach to foreign policy analysis bearing many of the hallmarks of structural-realist formulations, an approach that puts great emphasis on Canada’s “relative capability” as a “middle power” in the international system. Although few in the country would embrace the realist label explicitly, many have heeded the structural-realist injunction that foreign policy analysis should start with an assessment of the country’s relative standing in the international pecking order. In the Canadian case, this empirical emphasis on relative capability has become suffused with normative significance of a decidedly “non-realist” kidney, summed up in the disputed concept “middlepowermanship.” The article concludes that, to the extent realism is to continue to be a presence in Canadian Foreign Policy scholarship, it will likely be the non-structural variant known today as “neoclassical realism,” in no small measure due to the logical inconsistencies of the earlier, structuralist, paradigm.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| 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".