Reflexive Pluralism in IR: Canadian Contributions to Worlding the Global South
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Observers of the evolution of international relations (IR) theory often point to an American hegemony in the discipline on a global level. However, more recent analyses show that there has been a systematic and increasing Canadianization of IR scholarship in Canada since the 1990s, facilitated by government policies that fostered the hiring of domestic candidates and the creation of Canadian foreign policy research centers. This process has by no means been a cohesive one, yet it reflects a tendency in Canadian IR to make room for a pluralism in ontological as well as epistemological and methodological terms. This opening up of space for diversity is an important yet underappreciated characteristic of Canadian IR's contribution to the discipline, which has not been seriously examined beyond the study of Canadian foreign policy. This article assesses the impact of Canadian IR scholarship on the development of a “Global IR” through an examination of its contributions to Asia-Pacific and African IR. We argue that despite its heterogeneity, Canadian IR scholarship in both areas is characterized by a common set of elements that, taken together, reflect a distinctly Canadian way of studying and practicing IR in relation to the Global South: pluralism and reflexivism.
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.
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 | 0.025 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".