Architecture of Denial: Imperial Violence, the Construction of Law and Historical Knowledge during the Mau Mau Uprising, 1952–1960
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In 2013, the UK government settled a class action suit, which alleged that the British Colonial Government had subjected Kenyans to detainment, ill treatment and torture during the 1952–1960 ‘Kenya Emergency’. During the trial proceedings, the efforts of three expert historical witnesses for the prosecution – Caroline Elkins, David Anderson and Huw Bennett – led to the discovery of a cache of over 8,000 historical files from 36 former British colonies. The material contained within these documents suggested not only that Britain was aware of pervasive human rights abuses occurring throughout Kenya during the Emergency, but that the use of such violence was in fact endorsed and systematically regulated at the highest levels of the colonial administration. Drawing on Foucault’s conception of historical archives as ‘systems of discursivity’, and making use of the testimonies of the three experts, this article explores how the British Colonial Administration was able to dominate the discursive space surrounding Kenyan law and Mau Mau identity, allowing it both to justify the implementation of systemic violence throughout the Emergency, and to evade legal responsibility for these abuses at the time, and for decades afterward.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".