Revisiting the African Union’s Strategy on Unconstitutional Changes of Governments in Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In recent years, Africa has experienced a spike in successful and attempted military coups. This has once again generated debate on the African Union’s approach to the problem of unconstitutional changes of government. This article contributes to this debate by identifying emerging trends of unconstitutional changes of government and analysing the African Union’s response to these trends. The article argues that electoral coups and constitutional coups appear to be the most prevalent forms of unconstitutional changes of governments in Africa. However, the African Union is pre-occupied with military coups while ignoring electoral coups and constitutional coups. This approach is both conceptually and practically defective because it undermines efforts to build democracy on the continent. The African Union has mischaracterized some recent military coups as unconstitutional changes of government. Yet, conceptually, these coups are unconstitutional power grabs which are not necessarily unconstitutional changes of government. By being fixated with military coups while ignoring constitutional and electoral coups, the African Union’s strategy fails to appreciate the nexus between constitutional and electoral coups on the one hand and military coups, on the other hand.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| 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".