African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA): The Theory - The Practice Gap
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) of the African Union (AU) has been widely and highly praised for normative and institutional transformation in the areas of peace and security and for enhancing the agency of African governments to deal with external partners. Yet, the consensus emerging in both policy and academic circles is that the APSA is under-theorized and the growing gap between the APSA’s lofty ideas and actual performance on the ground has not received sufficient scholarly attention. This gap between theory and practice poses a potent challenge to Africa’s ‘ownership’ of its peace and security structures and processes, and to the operability and effectiveness of the various partnerships that are both critical to maximizing the benefits of complementarity between AU’s roles and those of its international partners, particularly the United Nations. The weak policy implementation also poses formidable challenges to the global image of Africa and provides further justification for those looking for opportunities to promote the pathologization of the Africa. This panel brings together scholars, civil society activists, decision makers and policy practitioners to critically explore: 1. the normative shift from non-intervention during the Organization of African Unity (OAU) era, to non-indifference under the AU, particularly as it relates to article 4 of the AU Constitutive Act (2002); 2. the gap(s) between peace and security norms and actual practice on the continent, 3. the knowledge produced about the APSA and the challenges that peace and security scholars, activists and practitioners face in researching, acting upon and institutionalizing the principles and policies of the emerging ‘AU normative order’, 4. coordination and partnerships between APSA and sub-regional, and multilateral institutions, and 5. facilitating communication and exchange of views/knowledge between various actors on the research, civil society and policy sectors.
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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 | 0.029 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".