A balancing act: Canada's multilateral engagement in the Israel–Palestine conflict
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines Canada's evolving engagement in the Israel-Palestine conflict as a lens to interrogate the interplay between like-minded and principled multilateralism in Canadian foreign policy. Situating the analysis within middle power theory and the post-World War II multilateral tradition, it advances the concept of selective multilateralism-a strategically reactive posture that reconciles normative aspirations with the structural constraints of alliance politics. Through a historical and contemporary analysis spanning 1947 to the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks, the study traces how Canada's positions have oscillated between declarative support for international law and practical alignment with Western bloc priorities. Drawing on UN voting records, official statements, and policy episodes under successive governments, it demonstrates that while moments of principled action-such as arms embargoes or support for humanitarian mechanisms-persist, they are frequently offset by abstentions, rhetorical hedging, or reluctance to hold allies accountable. The post-October 7 period, marked by intensified geopolitical polarization, reveals both the capacity and the limits of selective multilateralism in sustaining Canada's credibility as a bridge-builder. The paper concludes that Canada's future relevance in multilateral diplomacy will hinge on its ability to pair legal consistency with credible strategic engagement, even when doing so entails political and alliance costs.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".