Beyond The Ideology of 'Civil War': The Global-Historical Constitution of Political Violence in Sudan
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is commonplace to characterise political violen ce and war in Africa as ‘internal’, encapsulated in the apparently neutral term ‘civil war’. As such, accounts of political violence tend to focus narrowly on the combatants o r insurrectionary forces, failing to recognize or address the extent to which political violence is historically and globally constituted. The paper addresses this problematic c ore assumption through examination of the case of Sudan, seeking to contribute to a re thinking of protracted political violence and social crisis in postcolonial Africa. The paper interjects in such debates through the use and detailed exposition of a distinct methodolo gical and analytical approach. It interrogates three related dimensions of explanatio n which are ignored by orthodox framings of ‘civil war’: (i) the technologies of co lonial rule which (re)produced and politicised multiple fractures in social relations, bequeathing a fissiparous legacy of racial, religious and ethnic ‘identities’ that have been mobilised in the context of postcolonial struggles over power and resources; (i i) the major role of geopolitics in fuelling and exacerbating conflicts within Sudan an d the region, particularly through the cold war and the ‘war on terror’; and (iii) Sudan’s terms of incorporation within the capitalist global economy, which have given rise to a specific character and dynamics of accumulation, based on primitive accumulation and dependent primary commodity production. The paper concludes that political viol ence and crisis are neither new nor extraordinary nor internal, but rather, crucial and constitutive dimensions of Sudan’s neocolonial condition. As such, to claim that politica l violence in Sudan is ‘civil’ or ‘internal’ is to countenance the triumph of ideolog y over history.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it