Between Law and Inhumanity: Canadian Troops and British Responses to Guerrilla Warfare in the South African War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the war in South Africa 1899-1902, British forces and imperial contingents from the self-governing colonies adopted drastic measures against civilians as a means to counter the guerrilla strategy adopted by the Boers. Protections afforded non-combatants under the existing laws of war on land were curtailed, farms and crops were burned, livestock and seed stocks were destroyed, and women, children, and the elderly were concentrated into refugee camps under British control where thousands died from neglect, disease, and starvation. Though technically legal under British interpretation of the laws and customs of the time, the harsh and inhumane treatment meted out to Boer civilians evolved from the ruthless military policies of British operational commanders, in particular Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener, and carried out by troops like the Canadians. Canadian soldiers were observers and participants in the nasty underside of military operations against the Boers, hardly mentioned in conventional military texts and histories. Military victory came with a disproportionate cost in human lives among civilians, with direct parallel to current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".