The Maghreb Region: Waithood, the Myth of Youth Bulges and the Reality of Frustrated Aspirations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rather than focusing on youth bulges, youth extremism or youth apathy to explain the crisis of the Arab world, analysing the structural problems—political and economic—that have led to the uprisings and demands for radical change is more fruitful. The literature on the region focuses often on the ‘youth bulge’ to explain poor socio-economic conditions and in particular youth unemployment, which is seen as a driver of political (often violent) extremism. While youth unemployment is indeed a considerable problem in the region, it would be erroneous to focus exclusively on the youth bulge for three reasons: first of all, the ‘bulge’ is more a myth than a demographic reality when one looks to the medium and long term. Second, there is no causal link between poor socio-economic conditions and political violence. Third, youth could constitute a positive asset for countries attempting to develop their economy. Thus, looking at the way in which the political and economic systems in place benefit only a small elite is a more convincing explanation for the precarious situation of the majority of MENA countries.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".