Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State, by Uğur Ümit Üngör
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One would think, in light of the horrendous carnage perpetrated in recent decades by paramilitaries in conflicts across the globe, that bookshelves would be heaving with general histories of the topic. But, as Uğur Ümit Üngör makes clear in the opening pages of his fascinating historically informed study of paramilitarism, his work breaks new ground by providing ‘an overview of a complex phenomenon, for which there are no comparative, wide-angle overviews’ (p. v). Specialised, densely theorised (and often jargon-heavy) studies of specific conflicts and their paramilitaries abound, and Üngör’s concise synthesis identifies many of them and their important contributions. But the value of Üngör’s work is his ability to distil this complexity into three shared characteristics that one can say with certainty mark all paramilitaries: ‘in all cases history matters, crime matters, and the state matters’ (p. 17). Üngör organises his book and its three main chapters around these three themes.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".