Peacekeepers in the sand: Canada and the United Nations Emergency Force
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Should the success of a peacekeeping mission be determined by the length of time the peace is kept, or the lasting initiatives of peace that are created? Judged by the former, the United Nations' first major attempt at a peacekeeping force was a substantial achievement. The United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) eased tensions and kept peace in the Middle East for over a decade. However, when judged by the latter criterion---the ability to create a lasting peace rather than merely observe a ceasefire---the entirety of the mission must be taken into account. Here the UN's report card is less stellar. UNEF's hasty withdrawal in particular, and the United Nations' inability to even imagine, let alone actively manage, peacekeeping's retreat, paved the way for the decade-delayed conclusion of hostilities between Israel and Egypt in the form of the Six Day War. This thesis provides a comprehensive examination of Canada's political and military involvement in UNEF from 1956 to 1967. For ten and a half years, UNEF was able to keep the peace along the Egyptian-Israeli border, and Canada played a large role in these efforts. Yet the subsequent myth of Canada's valour and success in international peacekeeping misrepresents the historical reality from whence it came. Much has been written about the creation of UNEF, a little about UNEF's withdrawal, yet next to nothing pertaining to the middle years. Examining Canada's participation in UNEF in its entirety not only provides historical precision, but also helps to more accurately evaluate current peacekeeping efforts. As the UN's first major peacekeeping undertaking, UNEF faced tremendous challenges in its creation, in its ongoing funding, and during day-to-day life on the ground. In meeting these challenges with varying degrees of success, UNEF taught three important lessons: Peacekeeping is inherently difficult---even more so without a clear mandate and stable funding from the outset; Canada needs to critically assess its participation in each peacekeeping operation; and peacekeeping is nothing without parallel peacemaking.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".