Book Review: Greatness and Decline: National Identity and British Foreign Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
But this is all good, for it allows Thomas Juneau and Bessma Momani, two of Canada's foremost experts on the Middle East, to focus on a more important task: exploring contemporary Canadian policies towards the region.In this book, they have assembled a team of seventeen academics and practitioners to provide us with an excellent and well-researched survey of contemporary Canadian policies and approaches to the Middle East.To be sure, the contributors make clear that we cannot meaningfully talk about a singular or coherent Canadian "policy" towards the region.Instead, Canada's approach has been messier, more disjointed, and more muddled.This reflects not only the diversity of the region itself, but also the region's lack of strategic centrality to Canadian interests, which allows the Canadian government to take a less integrated policy approach to the range of key issues that have confronted decision-makers in Ottawa.The chapters in this collection explore those key issues over the last two decades.Three opening chapters focus on the broader geostrategic context, examining how Canada's relationship with the United States has shaped Canada's policy towards the region, Canada's contributions to the multilateral coalition organized against the Islamic State, and Canadian efforts to support security services in the region.The transnational link is examined in chapters on foreign fighters returning to Canada and the Canadian approach to Syrian refugees.While the editors purposely do not try to cover Canada's policies towards each of the countries in the region, there are chapters on Canada's approach to development in Jordan, "illiberal democracy" in Turkey, political Islam in Egypt, and weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.While the issue of human rights appears in numerous chapters, one chapter focuses on Canada's often confused efforts to promote human rights in the region.Three chapters focus on different aspects of Canada's approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict.A concluding essay summarizes the chapters and makes an eloquent pitch for the development of a broader strategic vision by Canada in the region.While this collection might not tell us much about Canada as a middle power, it does nicely demonstrate how-and why-the Middle East continues to matter to Canadians.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.032 | 0.007 |
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".