In the name of emancipation? Interrogating the politics of Canada's human security discourse.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada has actively incorporated human security into its foreign policy framework ever since the first articulation of human security in the 1994 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Annual Report. The Canadian Government has been at the forefront of promoting the concept internationally, thereby identifying Canada as one of the leading 'humanist-activist' states. This thesis, however, takes a more skeptical approach towards the emancipatory claims of Canada's human security discourse. It argues that, despite its overarching humanistic tone, the question of who is secured through the language and operationalization of human security remains problematic. In examining Canada's human security discourse in reference to this central question, this thesis analyses the promotion and operationalization of human security within Canada and abroad. The central argument of this thesis is that with its overwhelmingly statist and liberal language, Canada's interpretation of human security is far from being a challenge to the traditional ontological claims of security as being the provider of political order. The Canadian human security agenda is driven by a traditional fear of national insecurity. It aims to secure national unity and identity in Canada, and its national and economic security abroad, by promoting the ideals of liberal democratic peace. Drawing upon the insights of critical security studies and post-structuralist approaches to international relations, this thesis reveals several meaning-producing effects of Canada's human security discourse. First, domestically, it perpetuates the truth claims of the discourse of Canadian identity by naturalizing the idea of Canadian goodness. Canada's human security discourse enhances the social control of the population by masking 'human insecurities' within Canada. Second, by framing 'failed' and 'fragile' states as a threat to Canadian security and liberal international order, the Canadian Government perpetuates the constant struggle between the zones of peace and the zones of chaos, and overcodes human security with simultaneously a statist and universalist language that aims to control as well as emancipate the 'borderlands' Third, while Canadian discourse on human security claims to encourage a bottom-up approach to security, it works ironically as an elitist policy which endorses an ideal form of governance in Canada and abroad.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.057 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| 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".