Thought Provokers
Development Blindspot: Children & Environmental Toxins
Robert Chambers recently highlighted corruption, entomophagy, neglected tropical diseases, cookstove air pollution, climate change and ocean ecology as blindspots in his “Can We Know Better?” (2017) book. I think we ought to add environmental toxins and child health. Consider the following quotes from “Children & Environmental Toxins: What Everyone Needs to Know” (2018) by Landriagan […]
Tags: #Blindspot #Chemicals #Children #Development Studies #Environmental toxins
Listening to the Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy
Arundhati Roy’s “Listening to the Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy” (2009) is a collection of essays, written during the 2000s. The topics span a range of issues, largely occurring in India. While the “field notes on democracy” were present, they were often implicit – which is somehow expected as the content was not written as […]
Tags: #Arundhati Roy #Civil disobedience #Democracy #India #Nonviolence
War in 140 Characters
If you have been following the problematization of social media over the years, the stories in “War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century” (2017) by David Patrikarakos might not be all that surprising. For those who are interested in how these processes actually take place – beyond the […]
Tags: #Conflict #Echo chamber #Social media #Troll factory #War
From Poverty to Famine in Ethiopia
Rural live in Ethiopian history is largely absent in the historical record – historians are able to work with a wealth of material from the long written record in the country, but these tends to only reflect a small segment of society. James McCann’s “From Poverty to Famine in Northeast Ethiopia: A Rural History 1900-1935” […]
A Diplomat’s Memoir of South Sudan
When I first came across Nicholas Coghlan’s “Collapse of a Country: A Diplomat’s Memoir of South Sudan” (2017), I passed it up. Memoirs can be interesting, but not always great (unless you are interested in the day to day activities and experiences, often without in-depth contextualization). However, while on route to South Sudan myself, I […]
Tags: #Accountability #Conflict resolution #Governance #Nicholas Coghlan #South Sudan
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap
Yuen Yuen Ang’s “How China Escaped the Poverty Trap” (2016) is an excellent read and should be essential reading for all development studies students and actors. This book challenges many assumptions that have long been repeated as mantras in research and practice. The author summarizes the book as one that “investigates how China escaped the […]
Tags: #China #Development Studies #How development occurs #Inequality #Participation
Slaves into Workers
For those interested in the history of slavery in contexts other than the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Ahmad Alawad Sikainga’s “Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan” (1996) provides a detailed account of the rise and demise of slavery within the Sudan. “In the broadest sense”, Ahmad writes, “this book examines slave emancipation and […]
Imagining Ethiopia – Identity in the Horn
John Sorenson’s “Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa” (1993) presents portrayals of Ethiopia – domestic and foreign, historical and present – and in some ways is similar to “Famine and Foreigners” (2010) by Gill. The book is partially about identity, but more about portrayals and perceptions of Ethiopia, Ethiopians, […]
A Decade of Ethiopia: Politics, Economy and Society
As appears in Progress in Development Studies 18(2): 147-14. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1464993417749150 Abbink, Jon. 2017: A Decade of Ethiopia: Politics, Economy and Society 2004-2016. Leiden: Brill. 253 pp. $24.00. ISBN: 9789004345881. Ethiopia is a country of contradictions. There have been sustained, high rates of macro-economic growth and progress on development indicators, with persistently high levels of poverty […]
The Black Man’s Burden
The role of institutions in development has becoming increasingly important, most notably in the recent works “Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy” (2006) and “Why Nations Fail” (2012). Before these books, Basil Davidson wrote “The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State” (1992), which places a large emphasis on the role of […]
Tags: #Basil Davidson #Black Man's Burden #Colonialism #decolonization #Institutions
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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