Almost at Home in South Sudan: International Christian Humanitarians and the Theopolitics of Recognition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, we examine the experience of international Christian humanitarian aid workers and who work in South Sudan. From interviews with thirty people in east Africa and north America, we derive a relationship between Christianity as our participants understand it, and their modalities of encountering “the other” – the people of South Sudan, who may seem different and unfamiliar, yet who must be met as part of religiously motivated life and work. In terrain of South Sudan, we argue that our participants enact a theopolitics of recognition, in which their emotional and practical connections to the people they serve are triangulated through God. This theopolitics operates almost entirely at the individual level, as personal encounters and work are mediated by the assumption of a shared relationship to God. The people of South Sudan are recognized as both familiar and strange, because they share a posited connection to the divine with humanitarians from the global north. We argue that this recognition is different from other ways of encountering the other found in literature ranging from feminist theory to international development. This study thus adds to scholarly knowledge of faith-based organizations and global humanitarianism. We also argue that while the theopolitical modality makes possible certain kinds of ethical action, it may close off other forms of action based in broader political critiques of global relations of power.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".