Return of the generals? Global militarism in Africa from the Cold War to the present
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Militarism is always historically constructed and context specific and must therefore be studied at the intersection of the global and the local. This article does so by tracing the continuities and changes of global militarism in Africa from the Cold War to the present. It argues that contemporary global militarism on the continent differs from its predecessor in two crucial aspects. First, it is promoted by development actors as much as by military establishments and is more firmly embedded within discourses of development and humanitarianism. Second, contemporary militarism remains focused on political order and stability but it is more concerned with war and direct combat. The article probes this paradox through an engagement with the concepts of security and securitization. It argues that today’s militarism is suffused with the values of security and that it is precisely the logic of security and securitization that gives it its contemporary political force.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".