World cities of the global south: the West African city as an international actor
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
Cities form international connections through sister-city and twin-town exchanges, they brand themselves to attract businesses and talent, and they even join international cooperative avenues. International relations theorists have increasingly recognized the relevance of non-state actors like corporations and NGOs, and some have begun to add cities to this list. City diplomacy has a long history in precolonial West Africa due to religious, tributary and trade relationships between large urban centres. Today however, African cities are largely left out of research on city diplomacy, which focuses instead on ‘global cities’ in advanced economies. This paper defines and explains the phenomenon of city diplomacy and brings West African cities into this definition using the cases of Lagos, Nigeria and Freetown, Sierra Leone. It concludes that while their postcolonial identities shape the ways African cities function, limiting their capacity to function as independent actors, these cities nonetheless engaged in, and benefit from, paradiplomatic outreach.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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