Law and the structure of authoritarian rule: knowledge, sovereignty, and judicial power in Sudan, 1898-1985
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How does a strong and independent judiciary emerge in a colonial or authoritarian state? What is the relationship between law and political power when the state is weak or legal authority is fragmented? This dissertation, which covers a period of Sudanese history stretching from colonization in 1898 to the collapse of the Numayri regime in 1985, argues that judicial strength and independence emerged as a direct result of regime policy, which sought to deploy the judiciary as a means of maintaining security, reducing bureaucratic inefficiency, and managing political activism. In this context, the fragmented and pluralist nature of Sudan's legal system is actually part of what has made state power possible, as it allowed successive regimes to play various judicial institutions off of one another, strengthening some and undermining others depending on the nature of the threats they faced. Drawing on extensive archival research and a careful analysis of political and religious discourse, this dissertation explores the role of civil, customary, religious, and bureaucratic courts in facilitating authoritarian rule in twentieth-century Sudan. In addition, it also analyzes the relationship between legal knowledge, codification, and state power in one of the world's most fragile countries. As such, it makes an important contribution to the literature on authoritarianism, judicial politics, and state formation in Africa and the Middle East.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".