Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the 2022 Queen’s Speech, read by the Prince of Wales to Parliament on 10 May, the British government declared that it was undertaking a ‘leading role in defending democracy and freedom across the world’. Its performance closer to home, however, suggests otherwise. Recent legislation has increased the power, and lack of accountability, of the police, Parliament and government officials, as well as restricting the right to peaceful assembly and protest, limited judicial oversight, weakened democratic institutions, and undermining the rights of the most vulnerable, not least asylum seekers. The British government’s plans to tear up the 1998 Human Rights Act and replace it with a ‘British Bill of Rights’ threatens, moreover, not only to strip away domestic rights protections and make it harder to challenge the state, but to undermine the integrity of human rights systems in Europe and beyond. While such measures would not, according to Human Rights Watch, ‘look out of place in an autocrat’s playbook’ (Y. Ahmed and E. McDonnell, ‘UK Government’s Proposed Laws Will Embolden Autocrats’, Human Rights Watch, 11 May 2022, available at https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/05/11/uk-governments-proposed-laws-will-embolden-autocrats), Lisa Ford’s book suggests that, rather than being aberrant, they are part of a long and imperial lineage of efforts to keep the ‘king’s peace’, or to maintain the authority of the sovereign to order people both within and beyond the realm. Through tracking the changing nature of colonial peacekeeping through the Age of Revolutions and beyond, and with it the growing autocracy of the imperial constitution, this wide-ranging and provocative book makes a very compelling case for the importance of the ‘king’s peace’, both in practice and as a legal idea, in defining the parameters of modern sovereignty. It does so through exploring a range of contests between the 1760s and 1830s about ‘who got to keep the peace over whom and where’, in Massachusetts, Quebec, Jamaica, Bengal and New South Wales (p. 3). While disorder in Massachusetts and Quebec was the catalyst for a shift, Ford suggests, from self-government to despotic rule in Britain’s colonies, it was in Jamaica that racialised techniques of peacekeeping were consolidated in the late eighteenth century, which were then spread throughout the British empire from India to Australia, not least a reliance on autocratic governance, the jurisprudence of emergency, and martial law. The making of this imperial constitution, for Ford, was thus a product of ‘the collision of very local problems of ordering people in place with the fundaments of imperial law’ (p. 228).
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".