Eyes on You while Your Eyes Are on God: State Surveillance of Religion in Ghana under the Provisional National Defence Council Regime
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses Ghana’s erstwhile Religious Bodies Registration Law (PNDC Law 221) passed by the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) in 1989 and the associated bans placed on the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormon sects. First, the paper analyzes how the state’s surveillance moves engendered lateral and anti-surveillance practices. Second, Eric Stoddart’s concept of (in)visibility is used as an analytical framework to track how both the surveilling entity (the state and community surveillers) and the surveilled (religious bodies and their members) actively partook in constructing the visibility and invisibility of the surveilled. The paper concludes that the state’s theoretical ambition of religious surveillance was not fully matched in practice, as implementation was mediated by a pragmatic blend of “seeing” and “unseeing.” Also, the response of the religious sects to the surveillance involved a strategic pursuit of simultaneous visibility and invisibility.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".