Frozen Conflicts and Internal Dynamics of De Facto States: Perspectives and Directions for Research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The complex architecture of fragmented authority in the international system remains under-theorized. Understanding the world of separatist regions that turn into de facto states is high on the research agenda. While patron states are said to be a necessary condition, we argue that it might not be a sufficient one to explain the varying degrees of survival/endurance of de facto states. This analytical essay is an effort to establish directions for research that would better account for the variation among cases by integrating their internal dynamics with what we already know about the role of external factors. Adopting a political sociology perspective, this article focuses on understudied aspects of internal processes and points to the role of local elites in state and nation-building during civil wars and after violence declines. We contend that such a perspective helps to account in a more comprehensive way for the processes underlying the status quo while, at the same time, analyzing the interplay between external and internal dynamics of frozen conflicts. We show that students of de facto states would gain from employing literatures on state-building and nation-building to articulate an analytical framework that would reassess the role of local elites in building a state and a nation, and analyze the societal (un)responsiveness as well as the strategies of passive or active accommodation, resistance or opposition within de facto states' populations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".