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Record W4254260056 · doi:10.3138/g47h-4h82-0112-0122

David Scheffer's “Genocide and Atrocity Crimes”: A Response

2007· article· en· W4254260056 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Mark Levene

Bibliographic record

VenueGenocide Studies and Prevention · 2007
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGlobal Peace and Security Dynamics
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGenocideCriminologyPsychologyPolitical scienceLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

I have to be honest: it was with some degree of reluctance that I agreed to GSP's invitation to offer a commentary on David Scheffer's paper.Not only has my involvement in genocide studies been explicitly on the academic, rather than hands-on activist or, for that matter, legal side, but also I have made abundantly clear in recent years that I do not find a real basis for genocide prevention either in Lemkinesque assumptions as to the development of strengthened juridical instruments aimed at buttressing existing international law or in military intervention against violators.1 Genocide, in my view, has always been, to greater or lesser degrees, far too inextricably bound up with the conflicts and tensions of the broader international political economy ever to be isolatable to the circumstances-however singular-of any specific state.Nor do I believe it to be a phenomenon wholly treatable-and hence curable-in its own right, without respect, that is, to a wider and more holistic epidemiology of violence in the modern world.This is not to say that I consider that genocide can simply be subsumed within wider categories of violence; indeed, one of the most peculiar, if not bewildering, aspects of the phenomenon is the degree to which it defies most conventional, including social-scientific, analyses as to its origins and nature. 2 Even standard notions that genocide involves a straightforward bipolarity between one group of actors carrying out the violence and a second group who are its defenseless victims, while it may have salience on some occasions, I find increasingly wanting, on a variety of levels, with reference to many of the contemporary instances referred to as ''genocide'' today.Prevention of genocide, if we are to arrive there at all, thus requires, in my reckoning, not only a much broader engagement with the systemic sources of conflict in the contemporary world but a paradigmatic shift in our approach to the fundaments of human life on this planet.This view, then, is not only at critical variance with much of the guiding spirit of GSP but must inevitably lead to something bordering on outrage from many of its readers, who passionately believe that something must and can be done in the face of the most gross human-rights violations of our era.Darfur is very much at this time on the lips and in the minds of genocide activists and academics alike, as touchstone to this aspiration.The need for action, they argue, is as urgent now as it was over Rwanda a dozen years ago.As a matter of fact, I cannot but share the intensity of this feeling, not least when confronted with the ongoing procrastination, not to say faintheartedness, of that thing we call the ''international community.''But what exactly is going to be the most efficacious route by which to deal with this particular affliction, not just now but later, and with all those other cases of mass atrocity that-whether correctly or incorrectly termed genocides-are likely to arise in the foreseeable future?At least my initial reluctance to engage with Scheffer stemmed from one wholly erroneous assumption.I assumed that, given his background, Scheffer's propositions would take us further into the realms of high-minded legal abstractions without much Mark Levene, ''David Scheffer's 'Genocide and Atrocity Crimes': A Response.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.015
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.082
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.120
Threshold uncertainty score0.082

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0150.082
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0030.002
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0210.027
Scholarly communication0.0150.017
Open science0.0070.016
Research integrity0.1200.142
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.003

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.

Opus teacher head0.041
GPT teacher head0.399
Teacher spread0.357 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

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".

Quick stats

Citations6
Published2007
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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