Backstage Mockery: Impoliteness and Asymmetry on the World Stage
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In recent years, episodes of diplomatic “impoliteness” have attracted growing attention among international relations (IR) scholars. Whether in the form of sharp-edged humor, insults, or other face-undermining behavior, scholars are increasingly examining episodes where the expected civility of diplomacy breaks down and impoliteness becomes weaponized as a tool of statecraft. While sympathetic to these approaches, I argue that the deployment of impoliteness cannot be understood in isolation from the powerful asymmetries that shape global politics. To show why, I advance a theory of mockery in international politics with an emphasis of a specific kind: backstage mockery. Building on the work of Goffman, I conceptualize mocking displays as acts of ridicule that undermine an actor's positive public image or “face” based on two contextual factors: (1) perceptions of transgression and (2) relative status. In hierarchical settings, lower-status members are often unable to openly criticize the transgressions of their social superiors because of the threat of retaliation. Covert or “backstage” mockery offers an outlet for weaker members to express their concerns and build solidarity with other members, while at the same time indirectly signaling those with higher status about problems. To illustrate the significance of backstage mockery, I discuss Canada–US relations and the 2019 viral video of NATO leaders appearing to privately mock US President Donald Trump.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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