Nature conservation, borders and violence along the Chobe River between Botswana and Namibia in the twentieth and twenty-first century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates the intricate dynamics of the Chobe River borderland between Namibia and Botswana, a border marked by its dual identity as both a national boundary and a conservation frontier. The Chobe River border has witnessed transformations from a colonial-era demarcation to an area drawn into liberation wars and, subsequently, a hotspot for militarized conservation. Drawing from archival material and interviews in the region this study illuminates the entanglement of nature conservation and violence in the region, exemplified by the harmful consequences of safeguarding wildlife along the border. We argue that the militarized role of the Botswana Defence Force (BDF) in protecting high-value wildlife and conservation zones intersects with the history of the Kasikili/Sedudu border dispute and the establishment of the Chobe National Park as well as with broader state imperatives, including security, finance, and legitimation. We develop this argument through a comprehensive investigation into historical debates over the border’s position, conflicts related to land use, and the BDF’s evolving role in green violence.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".