“Chiefs do not talk law, most of them talk power.” Traditional authorities in conflicts over land grabbing in Ghana*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the context of large-scale land deals in sub-Saharan Africa, social conflicts have increased. In many of these conflicts, traditional authorities are central actors. Whereas several studies highlight their significance as mediators in conflicts, their role as conflict actors is hardly considered. I address this lacuna by referring to a conflict around an agro-industrial project in Ghana. Using Steven Lukes’ three-dimensional power approach I demonstrate how preexisting hierarchies between traditional authorities are reinforced. I argue that these hierarchies are mostly insignificant for everyday land use practices but become relevant in conflict settings, allowing traditional authorities to reinterpret existing social orders and institutional arrangements with the aim to achieve territorial control. An interplay of different forms of power simultaneously prevents broad opposition of land users against traditional authorities while, in this way, contributing to indirect legitimization of traditional authorities, the underpinning of their authority and deepening social division.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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".