Governance and Conflict in the Sahel’s ‘Ungoverned Space’
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
This article concerns governance and violence rates across the ‘ungoverned’ spaces of the African Sahel. We consider how the dominant narrative for Africa generally, and the Sahel specifically, ‘securitizes’ space, and presents poverty, underdevelopment, and ‘ungoverned’ spaces as security threats to be addressed (Abrahamsen 2005; Keenan 2008). We argue that the terms ‘failed’ and ‘ungoverned’ have become coterminous and common because they benefit various state and international powers within and across the Sahel, who avoid responsibility for the geo-political and economic processes within these spaces. Not only does the term ‘ungoverned’ obscure the actual practices of power within large states with significant under-populated spaces, but it wrongly assumes and accuses those within that space of being more likely to engage in forms of violence that are destabilizing to state structures and external interests. Actual practices of power across the Sahel reveal that large Sahelian states differ significantly in their types of governance, violence rates and trajectories, activities of opposition groups, and long-term prospects for peace. <div> </div>
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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