The decay of the democratic ideal and the rise of uncivil society: the case of organised crime in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article examines organised crime in South Africa, focusing on clusters of criminal actors and their impact on the emergence of an uncivil society. It discusses how these actors undermine state legitimacy and compromise democratic ideals. South Africa’s vulnerability to organised crime is highlighted, with references to state criminality and terms like mafia state and state capture. The rise of a broader uncivil society, facilitated by criminal clusters, is explored. The article qualitatively traces organised crime as a phenomenon in the society in an objective, measurable way, observing contextual elements of manifestation and representation. Despite resistance and elements of liberal democracy, South Africa’s democracy remains vulnerable. Organised criminal groups systematically and unpredictably erode democratic principles, posing a collective threat to the democratic system. The narrative of an uncivil society driven by organised crime shows extensive involvement across all societal sectors.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".