States of Rumors: Politics of Information Along the Turkish-Syrian Border, 1925–1945
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I focus on the production and circulation along the Turkish-Syrian border of rumors about the imminent annexation of Northern Syria by Turkey in the interwar years. Drawing on Joel S. Migdal and Sabine Dullin’s works on the shared production of states and borders between the “center” and the “periphery”, this article suggests that the study of the webs of rumors and information originating from the Turkish-Syrian border helps provide an alternative narrative about the bordering processes in the Middle East and beyond. To achieve this, I analyze dozens of reports produced by the border authorities and consulates as well as press articles in which such rumors were recorded and conveyed for more than two decades. I argue that rumors played a role not only in determining the way Turkish and French mandatory authorities intervened in borderlands’ everyday life, but also in how the two governments interacted to each other.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".