Grassroots Pan-Africanism: Border Lives and Transnational Belonging in the Lake Chad Basin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores how grassroots Pan-Africanism is lived and practiced in the Lake Chad Basin (LCB), a region where borders function both as instruments of state control and as conduits for transnational connection. Drawing on interviews conducted across the LCB region, it traces how everyday cross-border interactions sustain regional solidarities that blur the boundaries of national identity. Rather than framing African borders solely as rigid enclosures or colonial relics, the article approaches them as fluid sites of negotiation – simultaneously regulating mobility and enabling forms of belonging that extend beyond the state. By foregrounding the lived experiences of borderland communities, it reframes Pan-Africanism as an everyday, improvisational practice rooted in mobility, resilience, and mutual dependence. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on African integration, showing how regionalism is not only imagined by states but enacted from below.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".