States and Pre-State Actors: The Nomadic Challenge to Westphalian Territoriality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The collapse of walls and borders after the Cold War has been coupled with a proliferation of transborder non-state actors. However, many non-state actors predate the state system itself. Surveying the phenomenon of traditional nomadism, this paper seeks to extend a critical dialogue about territoriality and borders in IR. Nomadism appears to present unique challenges to sovereignty. It destabilizes the state’s ability to maintain a territorially fixed population under law, undermining the state’s ability to control its borders. Adopting a constructivist approach, we argue that nomadism constitutes as much an ideational as a material threat to the state. The impulse to delegitimate and curtail nomadism belongs to the ideational structure of sovereignty. By disrupting the territorial foundation of statehood, nomadism becomes a source of ontological insecurity for the state. States have responded to nomadism chiefly in three ways. Many forcibly settle nomads. Others facilitate relatively free international migration, by reducing the salience of borders as barriers to transit. In many further instances, weak states are unable to secure borders, allowing nomads to migrate relatively freely. We offer three examples: Bedouins, often forcibly settled; Roma, permitted to migrate transnationally within the European Union; and African pastoralists, permitted to migrate by porous borders. While the Bedouin and African instances suggest a necessary conflict between the role of state and the culture of nomadism, the European experience suggests that an ontological desecuritization of nomadism is possible: a relaxation of borders can allow these two political frames of reference to coexist.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".