The State, Security, and Intervention beyond West Africa: examining the arc of instability and conflict on the continent of Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Considering the tense moments of crises and conflicts which West Africa went through before the end of the Cold War, it was least expected that the post-cold-war era would unleash another moment of crisis—one that would be even more devastating to the entire continent. However, the end of the Cold War, and the events at the aftermath of 9/11, saw not only West Africa, but the entire African continent, immersed in a series of ongoing critical security paradoxes. This paper attempts to contribute to, and build upon, the insights of a key expert, Emmanuel Aning Kwesi, on the West Africa security conundrum as enunciated in the publication, “West Africa Security Perspectives: Kwesi Aning Explains,” published by the Danish Institute for International Studies. Emanuel Kwesi Aning, a Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre, Ghana, was tasked to explain how the West African subregion found itself smeared by critical security scenarios. Aning, in his discourse, focused on eight critical security challenges in the sub-region, including the weak nature of the state, the rise and existence of organised crime, illegal mining, climate change, demography and urbanization, armed robbery at sea and piracy, security, and intervention. This paper continues the dialogue with Kwesi Aning by summarizing the eight critical security paradoxes into three major areas: the character of the state, the nature of security, and the necessity for external intervention. This paper also goes beyond the West African scenario in which Professor Kwesi Aning situated his discourse and submits that this challenge is not only for West Africa, but for the entire continent.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".