Property, Territory, and Peace: Liberal Order and the US-Canada Security Community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why and how did the US-Canada security community emerge? This dissertation offers a historical materialist reassessment of peace between Canada and the United States. It contends that the evolution of political policing, informed by the development of social property relations in North America from colonization to the 20th century, represents an underappreciated factor in the transformation of the US-Canada space from a zone of conflict to one of peace. Geopolitically mediated class dynamics shaped the region’s institutions, territoriality, and foreign policies before the community’s emergence. Until the 20th century, governing authorities in the two territories often regarded each other as potential allies of their respective internal enemies including Indigenous peoples, populist agitators, and secessionists. However, the consolidation of transnational industrial capitalism in the region ultimately gave rise to a sense of common cause. Faced with leftist and anti-colonial agitation, the US and Canada began to integrate their security measures. Over time, ideas of national security, and the political policing this entailed, became intertwined with international conflicts and the familiar image of the US-Canada security community as an instance of solidarity against external threats could take hold. But this obscured the persistent relevance of political policing to the community’s operation. This dissertation’s argument engages with theories of liberal peace, both capitalist peace theory and democratic peace theory, as they have been applied to the US-Canada case and beyond. Ultimately, I conclude that it is necessary to supplement these theories with a recognition of how capitalism has shaped the idea of democracy and liberal governance’s internal tension between the suppression of dissent in defence of liberal values and the toleration of dissent as an ideological tenet. When these factors are considered, the US-Canada security community can be understood not simply as an instance of liberal peace, but as a product of a fundamentally capitalist liberal order.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".