The decriminalization of same-sex relations in Botswana: National, regional and international dimensions of LGBTQI+ activism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the first instance in the past 25 years of the decriminalization of same-sex relations in Africa via strategic litigation. It asks: What are the main factors that contributed to decriminalization in Botswana in 2019? What relative role did national, regional and international actors play? Drawing in part on interviews with key actors and observers in Southern Africa, it argues that Botswanan LGBTQI+ activists’ efforts outside the courtroom played a key role. They mobilized crucial support, expertise and financial resources of allies at home and elsewhere in Southern Africa, with some financial assistance from the Southern African affiliate of an international philanthropic network. Nonetheless, national activists maintained ownership of the process. The case thus contradicts assumptions in the literature that when human rights activists obtain assistance from transnational activist networks, the aid comes from the Global North and the international actors dominate the process.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".