Middle power liberal internationalism and mediation in messy places: The Canadian dilemma
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada seeks to increase its role in mediation as part of a renewed liberal internationalist foreign policy. This means confronting the question of how to manage the domestic political consequences of engaging as a mediator with those violating cherished international norms, while also upholding the view that they should be punished. Key to all this is the concept of impartiality, particularly as it relates to the objectives of liberal internationalist countries. This paper explores multiple meanings of the term “impartial” as they pertain to mediation, particularly with respect to the question of mediations involving those who have violated international norms. The paper then explores whether increased support for “arms length” mediations, such as Track Two diplomacy, might allow for more involvement in mediation, while avoiding direct involvement in morally fraught situations. The paper concludes that Track Two can be useful in developing a national capacity for international mediation, and that work can also be done to make Track Two—which is currently based largely on Western concepts—more indigenous. However, support for Track Two does not answer the fundamental question of how Canada, as such, can be more active as a mediator if it is not willing to engage with actors who have committed atrocities.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.051 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".