Bibliographic record
Abstract
BOOK REVIEW: FROZEN CONFLICTS IN EUROPE Frozen in Europe. Anton Bebler (ed.). Opladen-Berlin-Toronto: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2015. 215 pp.Conflicts between states and conflicts resulting from secessions not always end with either a victory of one side or a mutually accepted compromise. In several cases, particularly after the Second World War, they resulted in a freeze. Such conflicts reflect the situation in which neither side is able to win militarily and both are unable (and often unwilling) to reach a compromise. There is a long list of such conflicts: from the India-Pakistan confrontation over Kashmir (since 1947) and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (since 1948) to the most recent conflict between Russia and Ukraine over Crimea and Eastern Ukraine (since 2014).Anton Bebler, Professor Emeritus of the University of Ljubljana, former ambassador to the UN and internationally recognized specialist in defense analysis, undertook a study of frozen conflicts in Europe in a comparative perspective.2 Under his direction a group of authors analyses seven such conflicts: Turkish-Greek conflict over Northern Cyprus, Moldovian conflict over Transnistria, conflicts between Russia and Georgia over the status of Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia, conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorny Karabakh, conflict between Serbia and Kosovo, and the Ukrainian-Russian conflict over Crimea. With the exception of the Cyprus conflict, they have been caused by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia. None of these conflicts have been solved yet, even if in all of them the antagonists have reached a stalemate, in which neither a mutually accepted compromise nor a full scale war seem likely.The book is based on an international project initiated at the conference at Lake Bled in August 2012, organized by the Euro-Atlantic Council of Slovenia, of which professor Bebler is the president. The study was supported by a grant from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation of Germany. The designed format of the book was based on the editor's attempt to find for each conflict a neutral expert and commentators from both sides. In case of the last chapter (on Crimea) Bebler wrote the chapter himself and - most likely because of time constrains - published it without advising commentators.3The original design has not been fully accomplished. In some cases the commentators failed to address the essential aspects of the conflict, concentrating instead on factual details. In some the editor was unable to find a competent and willing contributor. Nonetheless, the book constitutes a major intellectual achievement and enriches the international conflicts literature.One of the valuable aspects of the book is its practical orientation. In the introduction, Bebler lists thirteen recommendations proposed at the Bled conference and at least partially applied to the conflicts under study. He also mentions some of the previous conflicts, frozen for a long time but eventually solved by negotiated compromises (Polish-German reconciliation and the Good Friday Agreement on Northern Ireland).Frozen conflicts under discussion have involved outside partners either supporting one side or the other, or trying to facilitate a compromise solution. In the case of Northern Cyprus the most important outside player has been the European Union, particularly since 2004, when Cyprus became its member. The European Union has also played an important role during the short war between Russia and Georgia in 2008, the result of which was the definite secession of Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia, recognized only by the Russian Federation and by a very small number of other states. The conflicts over Nagorny Karabakh and over Transnistria involved the Russian Federation as the main outside power guarantying the ceasefires. …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.048 | 0.020 |
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".