The myth of global Islamic terrorism and local conflict in Mali and the Sahel
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
IN THE WAKE OF THE RAPID escalation of the conflict in Mali, analyses and articles seeking to make sense of the situation and its actors have proliferated.1 Nevertheless, political figures, policy makers, and researchers continue to fall back on simplistic narratives in their attempts to explain the intensification of violent Islamist activity in the region. Without a finely tuned understanding of diverse groups – their structures, objectives, and modalities of violence – analysts risk recycling dangerously misleading narratives about Islamist violence in Africa and its consequences. This briefing draws on empirical evidence of violent Islamist activity, strategy, and structure to highlight the differentiated nature of groups operating in the Sahel region and further west, in what has come to be known as Africa's ‘arc of instability’.2 It contends that violent Islamist groups emerge in and are shaped by distinct domestic contexts and issues, a feature that is obscured by a totalizing narrative of global Islamic terrorism. In turn, leaders seek to cast opposition threats as extreme and associated with Al-Qaeda in order to locate the blame for violence elsewhere, away from poor records of governance, state capacity, and representation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 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