Farmers, soldiers, and ghostheads: laboring in the minefields of Cambodia
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Today, Cambodian veterans describe a series of shifting loyalties that occurred over decades of civil war. When one army took over a regime, its generals conscripted villagers who had been fighting on the opposite side. In these armies, villagers-turned-soldiers installed millions of landmines in their country’s soil. In the contemporary, the landmines must be unearthed safely and many of these soldiers find employment disarming the country. But the stigma of war and death and the distrust of state authorities throw even acts of demining the country under a shadow of suspicion. Villagers equate deminers with the violence of soldiers. Indeed, sometimes the state deploys these deminers to enforce border patrols and land grabs. Likewise, the demining platoons (as they are called) often have people who have undergone multiple conscriptions, resulting in teams where former enemies must learn to work together. This paper profiles typical career trajectories for deminers, assessing their transitions from civilian to military to post conflict lives. Drawing from ethnographic data among deminers, it considers how legacies of the past find purchase in stigmas the deminers face as well as the ongoing state violence villagers face such as landgrabbing and forced migration. It shows how the presence of deminers, turned from farmers and soldiers, confronts people with the ordinariness of human violence, undoing binaries of conflict/post-conflict, combatant/non-combatant, and war/peace.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 it