Local Ethics and Conflicts of Interest: Living Between Bottom-Up from Top-Down Peace in Provincial Egypt
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
This article proposes and explores a fundamental difference between top-down and bottom-up understandings of peace and conflict. Set in the provincial Egyptian city of Beni Suef, the article first examines three major contemporary conflicts (revolutionary conflict, sectarian conflict, and economic conflict), which have most colored my interlocutors' lives. Next, the article employs ethnographic data collected in Beni Suef between 2011 and 2018 in order to investigate how ordinary Egyptians have experienced the different conflicts in their day-to-day lives. I argue that, while the structural conflicts that most shape life in provincial Egypt are driven by overarching geopolitical, political, and economic interests, the majority of my interlocutors' everyday lives centered on local ethics. The basic divergence between top-down interests and local ethics, I conclude, explains the inherent lack of scalability and inescapable disconnect between top-down and bottom-up approaches to peace and conflict.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it