Middle powers in new arenas : understanding Canada's Arctic policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Do middle powers side with status quo powers or rising/revisionist powers in new arenas of international cooperation and conflict? This research focuses on a case study of how Canada as a middle power manages its Arctic policy between the United States (US), the established superpower, and China, the rising and revisionist superpower, in its Arctic governance. Relatively little attention is given to the general question of how a middle power in the international system behaves in a new context. Does Canada feel threatened by China in its Arctic policy? Or does Canada want to be neutral between the US and China in its Arctic policy so that Canada does not need to take a side? Or might Canada feel threatened by the US in the current era? To determine which of the hypotheses is the true situation, primary data through semi-structured interviews of Canadian elite policymakers have been collected. This research finds evidence for the argument that Canada feels threatened by China’s Arctic policy and activities because China’s behaviour, investments, increasing influence, and its Russia connection in the Arctic go against the national interests of Canada. Canada generally seeks to follow a rules-based international system under the US. This means that Canada is a strong supporter of the current international order in which Canada feels secure and from which it derives benefits. Other middle or small powers as well as Arctic states, such as Denmark and Sweden, also play similar roles. This research finds evidence that middle powers generally tend to balance against a rising superpower because China seeks to revise the existing world order, which goes against middle and other powers such as Canada, Denmark, and Sweden. Therefore, they side with the US for security reasons in this age of the New Cold War. The Canadian case and the other two examples demonstrate that middle powers, due to their interests and security, generally tend to balance against a rising superpower in the international system.
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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".