Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article draws attention to the United Nations' sustained development interventions at the Buddha’s birthplace of Lumbini, in the rural Terai region of Nepal. Following a self-described “pilgrimage” to Lumbini in April 1967, former United Nations secretary-general U Thant championed a call to restore the site to its rightful glory as a global pilgrimage destination and center of “world peace.” Despite fifty years of formal sponsorship by the United Nations, Lumbini’s development remains incomplete. This article has three main arguments. First, the UN’s sustained investment in Lumbini marks an unprecedented convergence between the international peacekeeping organization and expressions of religious piety and devotion. For many Buddhists, Lumbini is regarded as an auspicious place on par with Jerusalem or Mecca. Decades of interventions at Lumbini challenge normative assumptions concerning the UN’s secular authority. Second, through these sustained investments the UN became the preeminent patron of Lumbini, conferring to the international organization the power to mobilize Buddhist ethical principles in its peacekeeping agendas during the Cold War. Development interventions at Lumbini led to the appropriation of a pacified and politically benign Buddhist ethic premised solely on the Buddha’s teachings of compassion (karuṇā), good-will (metta), and nonviolence (ahiṃsā). These ethical maxims were harmonized with the UN Charter and redirected to justify the organization’s sustained investment in Nepal. Third, UN sponsorship of Lumbini brought together disparate political entities and religious organizations in service of a common goal, but friction amongst these stakeholders beleaguered the development proceedings throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Despite these tensions, UN intervention has left an indelible mark on the accessibility of the site and its global prestige as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.263 | 0.083 |
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".