Local Ethics and Conflicts of Interest: Living Between Bottom-Up from Top-Down Peace in Provincial Egypt
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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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".