Customary Law and Authority in a State under Construction: The Case of South Sudan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Customary law in South Sudan is a powerful symbol of emancipation from two centuries of external domination, and paradoxically, also the product of such external domination. Most citizens of the world’s newest state rely more on customary laws and local authorities to regulate their conflicts than on other civilian state institutions and statutory law. At the current juncture, influential decision-makers in and outside the government are pushing to develop Sudan’s customary laws into a Common Law for South Sudan. However, the legacy of the armed conflict, including patterns of militarization, and the ongoing modernization of society, pose challenges for customary systems. Furthermore, customary systems exhibit certain human rights deficits and, therefore, need to be made compatible with the constitutional framework of South Sudan. The recognition of customary authority and law as an essential part of the governance structure, coupled with targeted engagement and reform, are indispensable elements of state and peace building in South Sudan. The government and its external partners must walk a tightrope to integrate the local capacity offered by the customary system into their wider efforts without inadvertently stifling its potential to reform from within or undermining democratically elected institutions.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".