"Africa's Czechoslovakia": Internationalism and (trans)national liberation in Angola, 1961-1976
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The list was found in a private archive in Lisbon. It recorded the names of a squadron of Angolan nationalist fighters, who throughout the 1960s and 1970s were embroiled in a protracted war of national liberation against the fading Portuguese empire. Little is known about these individuals, such as Commander Miguel Sebastião João or Commissioner João Constetavél, but their noms de guerre – “Che Guevara” and “Lumumba”, respectively – spoke volumes. By deliberately choosing such value-laden pseudonyms, Angolan nationalists invoked the revolutionary heritages of other Third World leaders, and situated their own independence struggle in a global battle against colonialism, racism, and minority rule. Despite British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s famous 1960 assertion that the “wind of change” in Africa was a political reality, Portugal fought steadfastly to remain the ‘last empire’. The ensuing battle for Angolan independence was many things: fifteen years of intense anticolonial struggle and the launch of almost three decades of civil war, a threat to white minority rule in southern Africa, and another battle on the long road to ending empire and colonialism. For some, Angolan independence represented the opening salvo in a period of renewed global competition, one that would take advantage of a weakened “west” to renegotiate the positions of power in the international system. The escalation of the crisis in 1975 cast doubts on the resilience of the bipolar cold war world order and indeed on the international system itself, drawing in actors from around the globe including the United States, South Africa, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. For others, Angola demonstrated how national liberation movements, as transnational actors, learned to operate within the international system to gain necessary material and moral support to help achieve their political goals. By studying Angola this dissertation addresses a constellation of neglected topics: the end of the Portuguese empire, the rise of Angolan nationalism, the roles of transnational actors, and the under-theorized relationship between the meaning(s) of liberation, revolutionary movements, and the wider international system.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.003 |
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".