Still agreeing to disagree: international security and constructive ambiguity
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article – which updates and builds on an earlier piece published in Global Governance in 2004 – concerns the deliberate use of redundancies, contradictions, imprecisions and other ambiguities in UN Security Council resolutions on the use of force, centrally including Resolution 1441 on Iraq, Resolution 1973 on Libya, and Resolution 2249 on Syria and Iraq. ‘Constructive ambiguity’, a term generally attributed to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, is employed in many areas of international law. This article identifies five different forms of constructive ambiguity found in Security Council resolutions and suggests reasons for why this drafting strategy is used. It concludes by considering the implications of this research for our understanding of the role of international law in international peace and security. It finds that ambiguity, deployed deliberately and strategically, is not the ‘design weakness’ that some scholars consider it to be.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it