What do victors do after winning a war? "Governing After War - Rebel Victories and Post-War Statebuilding" by Shelley Liu (2024) begins to answer this question with two in-depth analysis (Zimbabwe and Liberia). The book emerges out of doctoral work she did at Harvard. The book is methodologically detailed, uses a range of methods, is intentional about choices and clearly written. Really well done. For anyone looking for evidence on post-conflict statebuilding, this is excellent, and for doctoral students this is an exemplary guide to follow. A couple of notes:

"This book explores how war time processes affect post-war state building efforts by examining the governing strategies of rebel groups that win control of the state. Post-war governance is a continuation of war: though violence has ceased, the victor must consolidate its control over the state through a process of internal conquest. This means carefully making choices about resource allocation toward development and security." (p. v)

"One solution to the problem of strong top- down control from an illiberal rebel regime may be to implement local community programs to build a strong civil society. However, it is not enough to simply prescribe international engagement in local communities. An important aspect of my argument is that my attention must be paid to where these efforts are targeted, depending on the policy's goals. I demonstrate in this book that the international community must contend with the double-edged sword of grassroots citizen political action. Ultimately, if grievances risk fanning the flames of renewed conflict after war has officially ended, then post-war efforts should focus on ensuring peaceful political participation from a vibrant civil society rather than violent participation from a resentful one. Thus international post-war reconstruction efforts should include civil society development to promote democracy and peace." (p. 263) 

One of the classic critiques of scholarship on Africa (and conceptualizations thereof more broadly) was penned by the Congolese scholar (and Duke professor) V. Y. Mudimbe in his "The Invention of Africa" (1988), which was followed by this book, "The Idea of Africa" (1994). This book revolves around the idea of "Africa" as an idea, meaning how it has been employed historically, through cultural expressions and so forth. Landmark contributions, as these are, often appear less groundbreaking when read decades later, which is more a product of the mode of critique becoming much more integrated into our thinking than it does the uniqueness of the day. A few notes:

"As I read some critics of my books, my first reaction was to remain silent. To use a metaphor, why should I be forced to play chess with people who do not seem to know the rules of the game? In effect, beyond positivism, I have been trying to understand the powerful yet invisible epistemological order that seems to make possible, at a given period, a given type of discourse about Africa - or, for that matter, about any social group in Africa, Asia, or Europe." (p. xiv)

"A comprehensive study of the "terra nullius" politics by Keller, Lisitzyn, and Mann (1938) indicates that between 1400 and 1800 not one non-European nations was considered to have the right "to possess or to transfer any dominion in the international law sense."" (p. 33)

"The sequence of analyses in this book has focused on two main significant issues: first, the Greco-Roman thematization of otherness and its articulation in such concepts as 'barbarism' and 'savagery'; second, the complex process that has organized in Europe the idea of Africa. It is, in any case, troubling to note that since the fifteenth century the will to truth in Europe seems to espouse perfectly a will to power." (p. 212)

Turkish-American economist and recent Nobel prize winner, Daron Acemoglu, along with British-American economist and also recent Nobel prize winner, Simon Johnson, penned the 2023 book Power and Progress. Given the star power, one starts the book with high expectations. There are a number of books that survey the history of innovation, such as Ridley's 2020 How Innovation Works. In this case, the focus is inclusive innovation that benefits a broader number of people in society, as opposed to innovation that benefits a few (and potentially harms the majority). Like Ridley's book, it is a mass market book that tells stories of innovation. Also like Ridley's book, the book is general selects positive cases from the West and negative cases from the rest and ends up with quite normative or ideological takeaways, as opposed to findings rooted in the evidence from the book / drawn out from the examples on innovation that are surveyed (that coming from a reader who has not won a Nobel!). The key solutions proposed by the authors include: increase people power via unions, increase civil society action and organizing, create incentives for social good, break up big tech, reform taxes to align labor and capital, invest in people / workers, enhance data protection, and the need for government leadership. A few notes:

"There is reason to be hopeful because history also teaches us that a more inclusive vision that listens to a broader set of voices and recognizes the effects on every one is possible. Shared prosperity is more likely when countervailing powers hold entrepreneurs and technology leaders accountable-and push production methods and innovation in a more worker-friendly direction. Inclusive visions do not avoid some of the thorniest questions, such as whether the benefits that some reap justify the costs that others suffer. But they ensure that social decisions recognize their full consequences and without silencing those who do not gain." (p. 29)

"By the mid-nineteenth century; tens of thousands of middle-status Britons had formed the idea that they could rise substantially above their station through entrepreneurship and command of technologies. Other parts of Western Europe saw a similar process of social hierarchies loosening and ambitious men (and rarely women in those patriarchal times) wishing to gain wealth or status. But nowhere else in the world at that time do we see so many middle-class people trying to pierce through the existing social hierarchy. It was these meddling sort of men who were critical for the innovations and the introduction of new technologies throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain." (p. 166)

I read this book in an appropriate location, while on a recent trip to Malaysia, where this book was penned. Syed Muhammad Naquib al Attas is a Malaysian philosopher and has written a list of publications, this book, "Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam - An Exposition on the Fundamental Elements of the Worldview of Islam", was published in 2001. It emerges out of talks he gave, which expanded into a series of chapters. The book is deeply philosophical, and covers topics of worldview, knowing, being and existence. As much as Amazon might pose challenges to some smaller publishers, it also enables these books to become more accessible, as the original publisher, Dar Al-Risala Publishing, retains copyright but this was printed and distributed by Amazon (expanding access to markets and people that likely would not have otherwise been able to access it). This is a book for those interested in the deep end of Islamic philosophy.

"From the perspective of Islām, a 'worldview' is not merely the mind's view of the physical world and of man's historical, social, political and cultural involvement in it as reflected, as for example, in the current arabic expression of the idea formulated in the phrase nazrat al-islām li al-kawn. It is incorrect to refer to the worldview of Islām as a nazrat al-islām li al-kawn. This is because, unlike what is conveyed by nazrat the worldview of Islām is not based upon philosophical speculation formulated mainly from observation of the data of sensible experience, of what is visible to the eye; nor is it restricted to kawn, which is the world of sensible experience, the world of created things. If such expressions are now in use in arabic contemporary Muslim thought, it only demonstrates that we are already being unduly influenced by the modern, secular Western Scientific conception of the world that is restricted to the world of sense and sensible experience." (p. 1) 

This is a 2021 Oxford University Press book, which I expected to more on the academic end but leans toward storytelling and a mass market book. The stories are interesting and well told. Book might be a good audiobook for trains or driving. Written by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, both are journalists.

"Without the trader, the economy of apartheid South Africa would almost certainly have collapsed many years earlier than it did. Chris Heunis, a South African minister, admitted that Pretoria had more difficulties buying oil than arms, and that the oil embargo 'could have destroyed' the apartheid regime. For the traders, it was a hugely profitable business. P. W. Botha, the leader of South Africa from 1978 to 1989, said that buying crude oil from the traders had cost the country an additional 22 billion rand (more than $10 billion) over a decade... The traders weren't making money through a brilliant understanding of the market. They were simply willing to put aside any ethical principles to make more money." (p. 89-90)

"But some, notably Switzerland, were extremely slow to act. Paying bribes to foreign officials was not only widely accepted within the business community, but the bribes were even tax deductible. It was only in 2016 that Swiss companies stopped being able to claim a tax credit against the bribes they had paid to businesspeople aboard, with the approval of new legislation' Bribery payments to private individuals should no longer be allowed as expenses that are justified for business purposes', the Swiss government wrote. Switzerland also dragged its feet in prosecuting bribery of foreign government officials." (p. 310)

Why do nations rise and fall, different theorists and theories abound, in "End Times - Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration" (2023) Peter Turchin gives some answers. What I really appreciate about Turchin's work is the methodological rigor and the use of data. His approach takes in components of culture, history, geography and demographics to track factors that, in particular, signal decline. As the title suggests, power and the role of elite are focal in social transformation and revolution, with a notable focus on the "over production" of elite and a rise of inequality (via wage decline, etc) that cause radicalization of the aspiring elite. This is well worth reading, and the author makes the work accessible for non-experts (although cliodynamics is not the most accessible name for the field of work, a term he coined in 2003). Recommended. A few notes:

"During the Qing period, elites were mostly recruited through the civil examination system, which consisted of several levels of degrees, conferred to successful candidates in local, provincial, and court examinations. The system worked well for the first part of the Qing period. It ensured a high level of literacy and competence among the bureaucrats. The study of Confucian classics helped to create a common ethos—a shared sense of culture, morality, and community—within the ruling class. And its emphasis on promotion by merit buttressed state legitimacy." (p. 23)

"All complex human societies organized as states experience recurrent waves of political instability. The most common pattern is an alternation of integrative and disintegrative phases lasting for roughly a century. Integrative phases are characterized by internal peace, social stability, and relatively cooperative elites. Disintegrative phases are the opposite: social instability, breakdown of cooperation among the elites, and persistent outbreaks of political violence, such as rebellions, revolutions, and civil wars." (p. 29)

Judith Butler has penned many well read and influential publications. Frames of War (2010) is a collection of (revised) essays that were written between 2004 and 2008. The content covers some challenging territory, including details of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Not sure these books are well worth obtaining, but attracted me to a collection of Butler's work that I might not have otherwise read (so it serves a purpose). A few notes:

"In targeting populations, war seeks to manage and form populations, distinguishing those lives to be preserved from those whose lives are dispensable. War is in the business of producing and reproducing precarity, sustaining populations on the edge of death, sometimes killing its members, and sometimes not; either way, it produces precarity as the norm of everyday lives. Lives under such conditions of precarity do not have to be fully eviscerated to be subject to an effective and sustained operation of violence. My point is that such visual and conceptual frames are ways of building and destroying populations as objects of knowledge and targets of war, and that such frames are the means through which social norms are relayed and made effective... Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone; they are, ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed. To destroy them actively might even seem like a kind of redundancy, or a way of simply ratifying a prior truth." (p. xviii-xix)

"Invariably, when an assault breaks out, such as the Israeli war on Gaza in December of 2008 and January of 2009 that took place under the name "Operation Cast Lead", we can start with the numbers, counting the injured and the dead as a way of taking stock of the losses. We can also tell and relay anecdotes that, along with numbers, start to develop an understanding of what has happened. At the same time, I am not sure that numbers or anecdotes, though modes of taking account, can alone answer the question of whose lives count, and whose lives do not. Even when it proves possible to know what the numbers are, the numbers may not matter at all. In other words, there are situations when counting clearly does not count." (p. xx)

"If the Islamic populations destroyed in recent and current wars are considered less than human, or 'outside' the cultural conditions for the emergence of the human, then they belong either to a time of cultural infancy or to a time that is outside time as we know it. In both cases, they are regarded as not yet having arrived at the idea of the rational human. It follows from such a viewpoint that the destruction of such populations, their infrastructures, their housing, and their religious and community institutions, constitutes the destruction of what threatens the human, but not of the human itself. It is also precisely this particular conceit of a progressive history that positions 'the West' as articulating the paradigmatic principles of the human—of the humans who are worth valuing, whose lives are worth safeguarding, whose lives are precarious, and, when lost, are worth public grieving." (p. 125) 

Matt Ridley's book How Innovation Works (2020) is a mass market book that offers a thematic run down of innovations (in health, energy, transportation, etc). The chapters are mostly brief descriptions, with little on the "so what?" of the innovation processes. When there are very interesting questions, such as simultaneous innovations in distant locations, these remain largely hanging. Nonetheless, this is an interesting read. A few notes:

"Innovation is the most important fact about the modern world, but one of the least well understood. It is the reason that most people today live lives of prosperity and wisdom compared with their ancestors, the overwhelming cause of the great enrichment of the past centuries. (p.4)

"Innovation happens when people are free to think, experiment, and speculate. It happens when people can trade with each other. It happens where people are relatively prosperous, not desperate. It is somewhat contagious. It needs investment. It generally happens in cities. And so on. But do we really understand it? What is the best way to encourage innovation? To set targets, direct research, subsidize science, write rules and standards; or to back off from all this, deregulate, set people free; or to create property rights in ideas, offer patents and hand out prizes, issue medals; to fear the future, or to be full of hope? You will find champions of all these policies and more, fervently arguing their cases. But the striking thing about innovation is how mysterious it still is. No economist or social scientist can fully explain why innovation happens, let alone why it happens when and where it does." (p. 6)

"If innovation is a gradual, evolutionary process, why is it so often described in terms of revolutions, heroic breakthroughs and sudden enlightenment? Two answers: human nature and the intellectual property system. As I have shown repeatedly in this book, it is all too easy and all too tempting for whoever makes a breakthrough to magnify its importance, forget about rivals and predecessors, and ignore successors who make the breakthrough into a practical proposition." (p. 243-244)

"The main ingredient in the secret sauce that leads to innovation is freedom. Freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest and fail; freedom from expropriation or restriction by chiefs, priests and thieves; freedom on the part of consumers to reward the innovations they like and reject the ones they do not. Liberals have argued since at least the eighteenth century that freedom leads to prosperity, but I would argue that they have never persuasively found the mechanism, the drive chain, by which one causes the other. Innovation, the infinite improbability drive, is that drive chain, that missing link." (p. 359)

"Politicians should go further and rethink their incentives for innovation more generally so that we are never again caught out with too little innovation having happened in a crucial field of human endeavour. One option is to expand the use of prizes, to replace reliance on grants and patents." (p. 387) 

Howard Becker's 2007 "Telling About Society" is a collection on a diverse ways to tell a story. This book is about the art of storytelling for social scientists, drawing on sociological roots. Useful reference book for thinking about communication, and in parts potentially manipulation and propaganda. A few notes:

"If you know the audience the makers want to reach, you can understand the features of any particular representations as the result of the makers' attempt to produce something that will reach those people in a form they will understand and approve. They will understand it because they have learned how to understand things like that, and they will approve it because it meets the standards they have acquired as part of that learning." (p. 67)

"When I taught field work, I made students crazy in the first weeks of the class by insisting that they write "more". A student who spent four hours in an auto repair shop would give me one page of notes, and I'd say it wasn't enough. It took weeks for them to see that I really meant they should write "everything," at least try to do it, and many more weeks for them to see that they couldn't do that and that what I wanted them to do was think through what they really wanted to know and write down as much as they could about that. And that only delayed the hard question, which was, what did they want to know? Because the trick in observing is to get curious about things you hadn't noticed before." (p. 98-99)

"I'm convinced that there is no best way to tell a story about society. Many genres, many methods, many formats – they can all do the trick. Instead of ideal ways to do it, the world gives us possibilities among which we can choose. Every way of telling about society does some of the job superbly, but other parts not so well. You can't maximize everything. Grownups have already learned this, but a lot of us forget it and get very righteous when it comes to methods of telling the story. That's not to say that no differences exist between ways of telling about society. Defenders of science will want to ask, whose map would you rather have: a trained cartographer's or one made by you friend who lives in the next county? Depends on what I need the map for…" (p. 285) 

The book "Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity" is authored by one the leading scholars of ideas relating to decolonization and coloniality. In this 2013 book, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni draws out the meaning and implications of coloniality, and sets the foundation for his widely cited 2018 book (Epistemic Freedom in Africa). There are chapters on South Africa and Zimbabwe as cases. A few notes:

"What is emphasized here is one of the core ideological life-springs of colonel conquest and colonial violence was the questioning of the very humanity of colonized people. Questioning the humanity of the colonized people authorized even slavery and other forms of abuse, repression, exploitation, and domination..." (p. 35)

"Global imperial designs refer to the core technologies of modernity that underpinned its expansion into the non-Western parts of the world from the fifteenth century onwards. Race and Euro-American epistemology, particularly its techno-scientific knowledge claims, were used to classify and name the world according to a Euro-Christian Modernist imaginary. African peoples, and others whose cultures and ways of life were not informed by imperatives of Euro-Christian modernity, were deemed to be barbarians - a people who did not belong to history and had no history." (p. 49)

"The field of development studies is terribly affected by what Žižek terms 'weak thought' as opposed to 'strong thought' privileging what he described as 'large-scale expansions' and 'true ideas' which are 'indestructible' and have the capability to 'always return every time they are 'proclaimed dead'. Weak thought has even blinded some academics and intellectuals to such an extent that they continue to uncritically believe in the innocence of development discourses and to defend wrong causes when they masquerade as possessive and developmental and operate under such acceptable terms as democracy, reform development, good governance, and humanitarian intervention without recognising and sifting out the dangerous colonial matrices embedded in them." (p. 82)

"What is wanted is a higher education that does not lead to alteration of African people from their societies and communities. But cultural transformation does not mean the disconnection of Africans from the ambit of global human society and broader human problems. it only implies that a confident African is one rooted in his or her society and whose locus of enunciation is African, Such an African would be able to formulate culturally friendly resolutions of the challenges facing the continent. Particularly speaking, cultural transformation, when creative, seeks a way of blending African and Euro-American epistemologies in an endeavour to advance and enrich the understanding of African experience, problems, and challenges. But it also entails a drive to decolonize knowledge, curriculum, epistemology, pedagogies, power, and institutional cultures" (p.180)