Privileged and Other Civilians: Hierarchies of Credibility, Security, and Compensation in Afghanistan and Iraq
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The distinction between civilians and combatants is central to international humanitarian law. Yet are there distinctions among civilians that scholars of international law and international relations should consider? On the basis of US military documents and practices, we argue that in the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, a hierarchy of 'civilianness' (Sutton) emerged. This hierarchy was structured along three observable axes of differentiation: personal security, compensation for harm, and credibility. Civilians with foreign passports - in practice frequently humanitarian workers or journalists - enjoyed the highest level of security, credibility, and compensation (in case of harm). Ordinary local civilians without ties to Western institutions were the most marginalized in all dimensions: their testimonies were frequently dismissed by the US military, and their families received inadequate (if any) compensation for harm they suffered. The case studies revealed the existence of an 'in-between' group that shows the operations of institutional power: civilians who are local residents but transnational ties to Western institutions through employment or family are sometimes able to mobilize these ties for better recognition and compensation for harms they suffered from Western militaries. The article contributes to understanding how global hierarchies are refracted on the ground in asymmetrical armed conflicts.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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".