Forging an African Union Identity: The Power of Experience
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
Abstract Pan-Africanism and references to a shared African cultural identity have an important function in the way the African Union (AU) seeks to mobilize a sense of belonging among African citizens. However, we know very little about how African citizens, in turn, relate to and identify with the AU and what shapes their sense of belonging as political subjects of the AU. In addressing this lacuna, this article takes a bottom-up perspective on the formation of an AU identity among African citizens, placing citizens’ own sense-making practices about the relevance and value of the AU in their everyday lives center stage. Drawing on focus group discussions among citizens in Burkina Faso and The Gambia, I show that the way research participants relate to the AU is based on and mediated through experiences. Rather than a vague Pan-African identity, what shapes the way citizens relate to the AU are concrete experiences with the organization’s norms and policies and their tangible effects on everyday life, which are conditioned by people’s (different) exposure to AU policies and their positioning within existing social, political, and economic structures. The importance of experience in forging a sense of belonging among African citizens does not preclude the existence of a shared Pan-African identity, but it offers important cues for both how to study the formation of an AU identity and how it can be shaped in the future.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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