Analysing (In)formal Relations and Networks in Security Force Assistance: The Case of Niger
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies on Security Force Assistance (SFA) have hitherto been dominated by different iterations of the principal-agent perspective to explain relations between provider and recipient. Yet, while such frameworks aptly illustrate these dynamics from a macro perspective, they are inadequate when analysing the complexity of practices on the ground. To mitigate this short-coming, the present article uses a Social Network Analysis framework to provide an in-depth micro analysis of relations between different SFA providers and the recipient state: Niger, focusing on the Belgian Special Forces. Drawing on field observations and more than 40 interviews in Niger, the present study increases our understanding of how dynamic (in)formal social networks impact the development of SFA. It points to the importance of timing, contingency and individual encounters as central in the understanding of how SFA develops and at times strays from strategies.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it