Pirates and Poachers: Race, the State of Exception, and Competing Sovereignties in Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines discursive and legal connections between campaigns against Barbary and Somali piracy. At the end of the 19th century, the figure of the black pirate receded from the Western imagination. When it was revived at the end of the 20th century, the figure of the African pirate intersected with another figure of Western opprobrium, the poacherits terrestrial replacement.The paper is based on two intersecting research projects. The first contextualizes both legal practices relating to and media coverage of Somali pirates. The basis of this research is both historical and theoretical. The paper applies Heller-Roazens The Enemy of All to questions of sovereignty in the Horn of Africa. The second project concerns the escalation of conservation campaigns against poachers, which is traced back to Dian Fosseys concept of active conservation. The paper then goes on to subject her writings to a Derridean analysis based in large part on The Beast and the Sovereign.Both parts of the paper ultimately connect via the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben. The paper considers how violence is used to justify violence, competing sovereignties, and legal impunity that allows the killing of both poachers and pirates in Africa.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".