Thought Provokers
The Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-41)
In back alleys and old book shops in Ethiopia, you can occasionally stumble across old gems. A recent example I found was “The Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-41) Genesis Ordeal Victory”, published by the Ministry of Information in 1975. It is a 28-page pamphlet that includes a large set of images. For a historian, the pamphlet is […]
Resistance and Decolonization
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973) is one of Africa’s great anti- and de-colonial activists and writers, and led the struggle for the independence of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. Another post, on Davidson’s “No Fish is Big Enough to Hide the Sky“, also covers Cabral. This post focuses upon a collection of his ideas in “Resistance and […]
Tags: #Amilcar Cabral #Decolonial #decolonization #Post-colonial #Resistance
Why We Lie About Aid
“Why We Lie About Aid” (2018) appeared all over development studies social media in 2018, at one point topping Amazon’s best seller list for the sub-category. For those who do not think aid is political, or who sit on the fence of development being political, Pablo Yanguas’ book is an essential read. The book makes […]
Tags: #Aid #International Assistance #Pablo Yanguas #Politics #Why we lie about aid
Civil Society: Challenging Western Models
Edited volumes seems to have a shorter shelf life than books, similar to academic articles. I recently picked up the somewhat dated (1996) edited volume of “Civil Society: Challenging Western Models”, edited by Chris Hann and Elizabeth Dunn, to see what it might offer. It was written at a time when literature on civil society […]
Tags: #Civil society #magic of transition #Steven Sampson #Susanne Spulbeck #The Social Life of Projects
How One Small Tow Banned Pesticides
Philip Ackerman-Leist’s “A Precautionary Tale: How One Small Town Banned Pesticides, Preserved its Food Heritage, and Inspired a Movement” (2017) takes a deep dive into one northern Italian town wherein farmers became activists and voted to ban pesticides. The book is a bit heavy on the storytelling, but it does not claim to be academic […]
Tags: #Banning pesticides #Mals Italy #Pesticide-Free Villages #Pesticides #Precautionary principle
Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy
Naila Kabeer, Ratna Sudarshan and Kirsty Milward edited “Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy: Beyond the Weapons of the Weak” (2013), which presents a series of cases from around the world. The book “shifts the analytical focus from individual women engaged in these informal forms of work to organizations that have set out to […]
Tags: #Informal Economy #Naila Kabeer #Organizing #Weapons of the weak #Women
Introducing Liberation Theology
Over the last decades, one of the sources of inspiration for new thinking in development practice has been liberation theology. Dr. Paul Farmer has utilized the ideas (in a less overtly religious form) and conveyed them to a broader audience, as the preferential option for the poor. What is liberation theology? Leonardo Boff and Clodovis […]
Tags: #Boff #Liberation #Liberation Theology #Paul Farmer #Practice
(Still) Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment
In the 80s and 90s an emerging set of research began to highlight that much of what we thought we knew about the environment in Africa, was, at best, only partially accurate. This had implications for policy and programs – and in some instances these narratives are still present. “The Lie of the Land: Challenging […]
Tags: #Africa #Environment #False Narratives #Myths #Soil Erosion
A Socialist Peace? Explaining the Absence of War
Recently published as: Cochrane, L. (2018) Review: A Socialist Peace? Explaining the Absence of War in an African Country. Progress in Development Studies 18(3): 214-215. McGovern, Mike. 2017. A Socialist Peace? Explaining the Absence of War in an African Country. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 249 pp. $ 30.00 (paper). ISBN: 9780226453606 Many studies have […]
The Origins of Political Order
Francis Fukuyama’s “The Origins of Political Order” (2011) is already standard reading, and should be read by all students of development studies. For those unfamiliar with the work, it focuses on the development of government institutions. This post picks up on a few points that resonated on a recent reading: The background: “Political institutions develop, […]
Tags: #Fukuyama #Inequality #Methods #Origins of Political Order #Unity
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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