The Surrogate State? : The Role and Capacity of Non-State Organizations in Substituting the Responsibilities of the State for Providing Education to Venezuelan Refugee Children in Trinidad and Tobago
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to the 1951 Refugee Convention, it is the state’s responsibility to protect and provide basic services to the refugees within their border. However, even if ratified to the Convention, it is common that the state decides to relinquish its responsibilities for various reasons. In Trinidad and Tobago, no national refugee policy has been adopted since the ratification of the 1951 Refugee Convention, despite the country having the largest number of Venezuelan refugees per capita. Consequently, UNHCR-determined refugee children continue to be excluded from accessing local schools. In this regard, this thesis aims to explore the role of non-state organizations in replacing the State’s responsibilities to provide education to Venezuelan refugee children in Trinidad and Tobago (TT), and to investigate their capacity as the Surrogate State. The research was conducted through thematic analysis of 8 semi-structured interviews with staff from non-state organizations in TT involved in the provision of refugee education, combined with document analysis. The results suggest that non-state actors, while respecting state sovereignty and operating within the national government's framework, have significant control over decisions and programs for refugee education in the country. This allows them to function as the non-sovereign Surrogate State, especially concerning refugee education.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| 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".