Private, Armed and Humanitarian? States, NGOs, International Private Security Companies and Shifting Humanitarianism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The article contends that, in the light of contemporary challenges, states are not only changing the meaning of the word 'humanitarian', but are also creating an expanding marketplace that includes international private security companies (PSCs) in the delivery of humanitarian assistance. Three types of factors — supply, demand, and ideational — have led to this development. On the supply side, state-demanded limitations on the private employment of violence and reduced commercial opportunities in Iraq have called for PSC diversification. On the demand side, states increasingly wish for non-state partners that are comfortable with their involvement in integrated solutions, something that PSCs, rather than nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), are more willing to embrace. On the ideational side, NGOs are concerned that humanitarian endeavour is losing its neutral and impartial status in order to facilitate counterinsurgency, 'hearts and minds' activities. PSCs, in contrast, are content with the partial delivery of assistance and likely will continue to be so given, in large part, the experiences of their personnel.
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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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.006 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".