Thought Provokers
The Liberal Virus
For additional background on Samir Amin see my posts on Unequal Development (1976) and Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (1997). Some notes from his 2004 book “The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World”: “Towards the end of the twentieth century a sickness struck the world. Not everyone died, but all […]
Tags: #Americanization #Globalization #Liberal Virus #Liberalism #Samir Amin
Capitalism in the Age of Globalization
Samir Amin (1931-2018) spent his life research, writing and acting against capitalism, in particular highlighting how exploitative is it for the peripheries of the system. On this, Unequal Development (1976), is one of the earlier important works. In its place, he advocated for a socialist system. In the 1970s he introduced the term “eurocentrism”, a […]
Tags: #Capitalism #Globalization #Intellectual Property #Samir Amin #Trade
Critique of Black Reason
Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosophy, based at WistU in South Africa. He has authored a number of influential works (such as Necropolitics), but given the importance of his works, is not as widely read and taught as he should be. Fortunately for English readers, his two recent books have been translated by published by […]
Tags: #Achille Mbembe #Critique of Black Reason #Fanon #Race #Racism
Who Owns the Problem?
A common theme of the lectures Pius Adesanmi gave was on narrative ownership. Much is said about Africa, but those stories often are crafted elsewhere. That is not to say that Africans do not produce narrative, he also shows, but that such narratives do not transverse the global wires as the others do, and thereby […]
Tags: #African Studies #Pius Adesanmi #Who Owns the Problem?
Decolonization and the Decolonized
Albert Memmi is well known for his book The Colonizer and The Colonized (1957). As a kind of follow-on “Decolonization and the Decolonized” (2004 French, 2006 translation), I had high expectations for this book (and had not having read the reviews). After reading the book, and now having looked at reader reviews and comments, I […]
A Social History of Land Reform in Ethiopia
Siegfried Pausewang (1937-2012) was one of the leading European scholars of Ethiopia, with contributions made over decades. His engagement in Ethiopia began in the late 1960s, as a professor at the then Haile Selassie University (now Addis Ababa University). This post covers “Peasants, Land and Society: A Social History of Land Reform in Ethiopia” (1983), […]
Tags: #Agriculture #Ethiopia #Land #Land Reform #Land Tenure
Zara Yacob: Rationality of the Human Heart
Zara Yacob was an Ethiopian philosopher, a rationalist thinking who wrote nearly a hundred years before Descartes. Claude Sumner has written extensively about Zara Yacob, devoting a career to Ethiopian philosophy and penning many books. Kiros says “Sumner is right when he contended that Zara Yacob along with Descartes was a founder of modern philosophy” […]
Tags: #Ethiopia #Ethiopian philosophy #Rationalism #Teodros Kiros #Zara Yacob
Silences in NGO Discourses
Issa G. Shivji is one of East Africa’s well-known critical scholars, researchers and professors. Much of his work has appeared in shorter essay form, as opposed to academic articles or books (although he has published several books as well). “Silences in NGO Discourses: The Role and Future of NGOs in Africa” (2007) is one of […]
Tags: #Development Studies #Ideology #Issa Shivji #Neoliberalism #NGO
Discourse on Colonialism
Aime Cesaire is one of the great voices of the anti-colonial struggle and was the teacher of Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks & The Wretched of the Earth). Cesaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism” was originally published in French in 1950, the English version I am using was translated in 1972 and republished in 2000. For the […]
Tags: #Aime Cesaire #Capitalism #Colonization #decolonization #Discourse on Colonialism
State-Peasant Relations in the Ethiopian Highlands
One of the leading anthropologists of northern Ethiopia, Svein Ege, edited “Land Tenure Security: State-Peasant Relations in the Amhara Highlands, Ethiopia” (2019), with contributions by Svein Ege, Harald Aspen, Kjell Havnevik and the late Yigremew Adal. For anyone interested in issues of land tenure and land security, particularly in highland Ethiopia, this is essential reading. I […]
Tags: #Ethiopia #Highlands #Svein Ege #Tenure #Tenure Security
About me
Logan Cochrane
Associate Professor at HBKU in the College of Public Policy. He is an Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences and an Adjunct Professor at Hawassa University (Institute for Policy and Development Research). Over the last fifteen years, he has worked in Afghanistan, Benin, Burundi, Canada, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Logan acts as a consultant for governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations, seeking to create bridges between research and practice.
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