Do international reputations matter and are they transferable from one context to another? These critically important questions continue to frame policy debates surrounding US responses to crises in Syria and Ukraine. For skeptics, past actions and reputations for resolve have no bearing on an adversary's assessment of US credibility; relative “power” and “interests” explain behaviour (Hopf, 1994; Mercer, 1996; Press, 2005; Walt, 2013; Zakaria 2013). We argue that scholars who dismiss the relevance of reputations typically sidestep important questions about how adversaries actually acquire relevant information about US interests and power. Building on an extensive collection of qualitative and quantitative studies of US deterrence encounters in asymmetric conflicts over the last two decades, we argue that lessons from past actions inform an adversary's interpretation of US interests in any given case and provide crucial information about Washington's willingness to deploy military force (capabilities). By implication, lessons learned from Bosnia 1992–1995 informed actions in Kosovo 1999, which, in turn, informed subsequent assessments of US interests and commitments in Iraq 1991, 1998 and 2003. Similarly, lessons about US reputations and credibility in Iraq from 1991 to 2003 were critically important to successful WMD diplomacy in Syria. Policy implications are addressed in the conclusion.

Scholarly opinions on the linkages between foreign military interventions and human rights promotions or violations are highly divided across the board. While many scholars see military interventions as effective means to save and promote human lives and rights from the clutches of repressive regimes, others reject such interventions as harmful to domestic reconciliations and rights promotions. The Arab Spring has renewed the debates between the liberal enthusiasts who staunchly supported NATO's military intervention to free up the Libyans from the Gaddafi regime and the critics who saw creeping dangers in this new intervention, ostensibly inspired by the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. This paper investigates the issue of Arab Spring-led foreign direct and indirect military interventions in Libya, Bahrain and Syria and critically examines the consequences of interventions for improvements or decline in Arab human rights conditions. Its findings support the position of the anti-intervention scholars that foreign military interventions produce deleterious effects on human rights in the target states.

In 1973, the federal government of Canada invited Aboriginal groups to enter into comprehensive land claims negotiations to settle outstanding claims not addressed by historical treaties. After eight years of negotiations, the Inuvialuit became the second group in Canada to sign a modern treaty, doing so in 1984. Missing from that agreement, however, was a self-government chapter, which was not open to negotiation at that time. In 1996, the Inuvialuit initiated self-government negotiations with the Crown but have yet to conclude an agreement despite increased institutional capacity. What explains this puzzle? Drawing upon the existing literature on land claims negotiations, Aboriginal self-government and historical institutionalism, we analyze a variety of primary and secondary sources to argue that a number of institutional and non-institutional factors have prevented the Inuvialuit from successfully completing self-government negotiations with the Crown.

This article critically examines the Conservative government's approach to official languages, through a policy instrument framework. Special attention is paid to the third federal roadmap for official languages—the first having been unveiled by the Liberal government in 2003 and the second by the Conservative minority government in 2008—and how this roadmap conveys a new representation of official languages in relation to Canadian identity and citizenship. The focus on the linguistic integration of new immigrants in the 2013 language roadmap generates interest. The policy instrument framework also shows how language roadmaps represent the fourth generation of official language policies in Canada; the first three generations found their respective bases in the 1969 Official Languages Act, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the 1988 Official Languages Act. The article concludes that an analysis of language roadmaps elucidates transformations initiated by the Conservative governments in the area of official languages in Canada. It also promotes further exploration and analysis of language policies through the policy instrument framework.

Criminal deportation policy in Canada follows a cyclical rather than a linear or partisan pattern. Based on a case study of Haitian residents deported between 1989 and 2009, I argue that criminal deportation cannot be explained as a stable proportion of the pool of permanent residents, but rather in terms of the political attention it generates. A change-point analysis identified two separate political mobilization phases. During the first phase (1994–1998), the integration of long-term residents is defined as a political issue and is translated into legislation (Bill C-44). The second phase (2003–2005) is a new episode of expansion that reformulated the issue around the concepts of risk and efficiency (Bill C-11). Despite recent legal reforms designed to accelerate removals of foreign criminals (Bills C-43 and C-60), the arrival of the Conservative Party (2006–2009) coincided with a decrease in criminal deportations during the period under review.

As a civil servant in the East India Company and witness to government expansion and reorganization in the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill developed an interest in civil service reform. In an essay supporting the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report and his later political treatises, Mill argued for competitive civil service recruitment. These writings have been relatively neglected by Mill scholars, but I posit that they elucidate a contested aspect of his theory. Mill advocated democracy and expert bureaucracy and, although researchers see tension between these systems, I argue that Mill saw them as compatible. Consequently, Mill's theory might be more consistent and complete than many believe, and the public administration debate should perhaps no longer be seen in terms of an opposition between expertise and democracy.

Each year through the practices of Canada's universities, vast numbers of nonhuman animals are caught, bought or bred, narrowly confined, manipulated and killed. These university−animal relations are governed by a state-based regime, the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC). Through the lens of critical public philosophy, I clarify the power that has constituted this governance regime and now sustains it, examining the regime's justifying claims, its practices that authorize universities and scholars as legally compliant and the related effects of its power. The resulting critical redescription reveals fundamental problems with the political legitimacy of CCAC governance and thus with the university−animal relations that it sanctions.

There is no unifying theory to guide the study of partisan political staff. The literature suggests staffers may be variously mechanisms for resolving principal-agent problems, extensions of centralized political control or spoils given as rewards inside the core executive. Annual Public Accounts data, available only since 2007, offer a promising new addition to the debate over federal exempt staffs. This paper presents descriptive and linear regression results on staffing expenditures for five years of federal data in Canada. Using the construct of “revealed preference,” predictors of variance in ministerial spending on staffing may provide new, objective information on their function in Canadian government. Results of this study demonstrate that quantitative methods can be applied to the study of political staff and may be a helpful addition as the field continues to develop, test and refine theory.

This paper re-examines the issue of hate propaganda under the Canadian Charter of Rights and the US Bill of Rights. It also reconsiders the significance of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration. What the paper attempts to show is that one strand of Locke's famous argument supports First Amendment exceptionalism and Justice Holmes's dissenting opinions in Abrams and Schwimmer, but another strand buttresses the Keegstra and Butler decisions and the Report of the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada. In the contemporary context of the debate over free speech and its limits, Lockean toleration has communitarian as well as libertarian dimensions, and the control of hate propaganda in Canada's multicultural and multinational polity becomes more clearly an important part of the liberal tradition.