Second Prize: The Last Vestiges of Statehood: Failed States and the Groups that Work Within Them
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores how the Somali terrorist organization Al-Shabaab straddles the line between terrorist group and insurgency. It argues that Al-Shabaab has been able to make use of non-state institutions, such as Somalia’s clan structure as well as the physical infrastructure provided by international aid agencies to maintain organizational capabilities within the context of a failed state. This research seeks to uncover the role of sociocultural and informal institutions that exist outside the formal structure of the state. Maintaining the ability to adapt to fluctuating political conditions has allowed Al-Shabaab to simultaneously engage in terrorist activity abroad while maintaining an insurgency campaign in Somalia. The insurgency movement is aimed at undermining the African Union forces operating in Somalia, while simultaneously delegitimizing the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS), as they are unable to independently ensure Somalia’s national security. This case provides insight into how external actors can react to both variants of violent movements under conditions of state failure. Understanding how these institutions are manipulated and appropriated by groups like Al-Shabaab can inform the way the international community interacts with failing states and their surviving vestiges of statehood.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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".