The imagined island: Colonialism and constructed remoteness on Diego Garcia
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 Colonial powers have long used islands and island forms for imperial projects, including military bases, weapons testing, resource mining and migrant detention. In order to pursue these interests, colonial powers have often sought geographically remote sites, but they further rely on the construction of remoteness. This article reflects on the colonial construction of remoteness by analysing the case study of Diego Garcia. The militarised atoll of Diego Garcia is one in a chain of islands that make up the British Indian Ocean Territory, the last colony created by the British government. While Diego Garcia is now under British sovereign control, the island was brutally cleared of its Indigenous inhabitants to make way for a joint British‐American military base. By detailing the ways in which ‘remoteness’ has affected the Indigenous Chagossians, ‘war on terror’ detainees, asylum‐seekers and migrant workers, this article demonstrates how colonial powers deploy remoteness as a way of distancing groups deemed ‘other’ from rights. Additionally, colonial powers use ‘remoteness’ to paradoxically protect their own proximity to colonial interests, including geopolitically significant sites for military installations.
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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