Ambitions, Profits and Loss: Zimbabwean Economic Involvement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Accounts of recent Zimbabwean economic involvement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) focus on commercial activities by military officials and political elites, and suggest that these groups' business interests precipitated Zimbabwe's involvement in the conflict.Such accounts obscure the real scope and extent of interest by the Zimbabwean business community in the DRC and ignore the historical context in which economic involvement has occurred, as well as the difficulties.Based on interviews with Zimbabwean entrepreneurs and government officials, this article analyses the circumstances under which entrepreneurs sought opportunities in a nation virtually unknown to Zimbabweans prior to 1997.It explores the effect of poor domestic economic conditions and previous Zimbabwean military involvement (but subsequent lack of business penetration) in Mozambique, on government and business resolve to exploit opportunities in the DRC.Further, it argues that military involvement was not initially motivated by profit.Rather, entrepreneurs followed military actors once military networks were in place, as entrepreneurs (and military personnel themselves) realized the commercial value of these networks. ACCOUNTS OF ZIMBABWEAN ECONOMIC INVOLVEMENT in the DemocraticRepublic of the Congo (DRC) during the Laurent Kabila era in the late 1990s focused on the commercial activities of military officials and political elites, and suggested that the business interests of these groups both precipitated Zimbabwe's involvement in the conflict and constituted the bulk of trade.For example, in her recent book Zimbabwe:The political economy of transformation, Hevina Dashwood makes a statement representative of most scholars, the media and even the Zimbabwean public: 'Mugabe's widely unpopular decision in August 1998 to intervene in the conflict in the DRC . . .was motivated by the ruling elite's desire to obtain lucrative supply contracts and mining partnerships, as well as to protect existing investments.'
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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