Honourable Mention: West Africa: America’s foreign policy post 911 and the ‘resource curse,’ A head on collision
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After 911, oil resources in West Africa were declared a national security interest of the United States. Unfortunately, many West African oil producers are afflicted with the ‘resource curse,’ which is associated with economic decline, personal rule, and civil conflict. The ‘resource curse’ is a source of instability in West Africa and threatens the stable production and exportation of oil supplies in both the short and long term. Despite the potential cost of insecurity in West Africa, the United States is pursuing policies in the region that will neither prevent nor diminish the ‘resource curse.’ America’s foreign policy strategy in West Africa is influenced primarily by the American oil lobby, the war on terror, energy security concerns, and competition with China. These influences have culminated in a foreign policy strategy that is focused first and foremost on the militarization of Africa. While security is an essential component of development, this very security can be a liability when provided to a regime that is repressive, corrupt, and/or violent. America’s current foreign policy strategy has the potential to undermine the goals of the war on terror and the reduce America’s energy security. This paper concludes with a discussion of non-military strategies that the American government may wish to consider, which could avert the ‘resource curse’ in West Africa and consequently increase security in the region.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.041 | 0.013 |
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".