Landscape Testimonies: Gulf Capital, “Deficient Deserts,” and Property‐Making in Central Sudan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT In the agricultural Gezira region of central Sudan, the term khalla refers partly to communal land that is used for grazing animals or rain‐fed farming. Beginning with the provocation that the khalla is “running away from us” due to large‐scale land investments and agribusiness practices, this essay takes up the khalla as a method through which to trace and analyze how past and emergent forms of capital accumulation, property, and empire‐making structure everyday life at the edge of the Gezira scheme, one of the largest irrigation projects in the world. It draws on Michel‐Rolph Trouillot's insight that landscapes testify to the layering of successive forms of colonial intrusion in a way that unites time and lays out how people have negotiated and contested these intrusions through forms of living beyond protest. The khalla testifies not only to waves of dispossession and destruction but also to continual processes of recovery and regeneration. While it may be running away, the khalla also persists in a way that prevents property from becoming a totalizing concept, allowing us to ask: What does and does not belong to the khalla ? If belonging often exceeds ownership, then what is the relationship between property and belonging?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".