The Silent Forces of Agency: War as Experience and Girls in Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper looks at young female soldiers in Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in order to study Christine Sylvester’s concept of war as experience. The common narratives of females who engage in political violence often detail their status as either victims or perpetrators. These frames essentialize women’s experiences of conflict, violence, and politics. Applying the idea of war as experience, the girl soldiers of the RUF can be understood as both victims and perpetrators of violence during times of conflict. This paper identifies how experiences of war can be perceived through the lens of physical experience, emotions of fear and self-security, and the further, ongoing implications of victimization. The RUF case helps explain how one can begin to understand why a girl would engage in violent acts and not just be a powerless victim. Through analyzing interviews conducted by Myriam Denov, it is discovered that victimization can be an opportunity for agency to some degree. There are significant consequences for essentializing women as victims since post-conflict programs often exclude women because they are not seen as ex-soldiers or ex-combatants.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 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".