Historicising Civil Society In Africa: An Analysis of the State, Democracy and the Third Sector
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses civil society as both a social value and as a set of institutions. However, whichever way we discuss the idea of civil society (as social value or as a set of institutions) in Africa, we are faced with some challenges because the idea of civil society poses a unique problematic. For example, to what extent is civil society a relevant idea in Africa, or does the idea of civil society any history in Africa, or does the third sector play any meaningful role, so as to be relevant in constitutionalism? Civil society as institutions derives its relevance from being between the state (government) and the people (society) to prevent the state from tyrannical and authoritarian rule and protect the citizen’s rights (democracy). In Africa, the state is either non-existent or it is in serious crisis, because it is fragmented and also lacks the peace to grow democracy while the African societies are more like communities as Africans are really more in communities than in societies. Again, in Africa, the liberal democracy that makes civil society institutions relevant is a charm. What do we then have in Africa, to make politics and liberal democracy (state/ society relations) a meaningful project?
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".