Thought Provokers
Blueprint for Revolution
Want to know how to use rice pudding, lego men, and other non-violent techniques to galvanize communities, overthrow dictators, or simply change the world? If so, that is the sub-title or Popovic’s “Blueprint for Revolution” (2015). For those familiar with this literature, many of Popovic’s tactics are of the Alinsky type. The book provides a […]
Tags: #Blueprint for revolution #Non-violence #Popovic #Protest #Revolution
Civil Society and the Aid Industry
Civil society is said to provide “the agents of change that will cure a range of social and economic ills left by failures of government and the marketplace: autocracy, poverty, disenfranchisement, oppression, social malaise. Cornucopian expectations for social change have been heaped on this idea and, indeed, for some Northern donors in particular (both official […]
The Ethiopian Borderlands
Historians of Ethiopia have rich sets of materials to work with from the empires of the highlands, however the relative abundance of literature from the highlands results in comparatively limited literature on the the other areas (that would become part) of Ethiopia. Pankhurst writes: “Historical studies of Ethiopia, like those of other countries, often tend […]
No Fist is Big Enough to Hide the Sky
Decolonization struggles against the Portuguese are often thought about as Angola and Mozambique, far less does one hear about Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Basil Davidson brings first-hand experience of that struggle, for which he was praised by none other than Amilcar Cabral himself in the Preface. The book, “No Fist is Big Enough to Hide […]
Tags: #Basil Davidson #Cape Verde #decolonization #Guinea-Bissau #Liberation
Rules for Revolutionaries
Want a post-internet, post-elitist update to Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals“? Here it is: “Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything” (2016) by Becky Bond and Zack Exley. The book is about ‘big organizing’ which the authors say “isn’t just about the effective use of the newest technology to scale participation in politics. As […]
Tags: #Big organizing #Organizing #Radical trust #Revolution #Rules for Revolutionaries
State and Land in Ethiopian History
Richard Pankhurst (1927-2017) is one of the most prolific historians of Ethiopia, described by the Foreign Minister as “one of Ethiopia’s greatest friends.” One of his earlier works is “State and Land in Ethiopian History” (1966). As expected from those familiar with Richard Pankhurst, the book offers insight into history that appears otherwise to be […]
Tags: #Ethiopia #History #Land #Law #Pankhurst
Civil Wars in Africa: Roots and Resolutions
For some period in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a trend in conflict studies that suggested civil war in Africa was externally caused and driven. To counter that narrative, a group of scholars came together to explore the internal, domestic aspects of civil war in Africa (without neglecting the external factors). The result was […]
Tags: #Africa #Civil war #Conflict #Managing conflict #Preventing conflict
The Battle for Afghanistan
The way war is waged has significantly changed since the 1800s. One might assume the lessons for contemporary times from such a period would be limited as a result. William Dalrymple’s telling of the British attempt to conquer Afghanistan in 1839-1842 convincingly show the opposite. In “Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan” (2013), […]
Tags: #Afghanistan #Colonialism #Conflict #Dalrymple #History
Ethiopian Migration to the Middle East and South Africa
There are reports of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian women working in the Middle East, and stories of dangerous travel across the continent of those trying to reach South Africa. However, little is known about the actual trends, policies, and pushes/pulls. A 2015 publication by the Ethiopian Forum for Social Studies addressed this topic in […]
Tags: #East Africa #Ethiopia #Forum for Social Studies #International migration #Migration
Social Hierarchy of Dawuro, Southern Ethiopia
A search on Amazon for books about the southern peoples of Ethiopia suggests a dearth of ethnographic publications. However, one key source of well-informed research that is rarely available to scholars outside of Ethiopia are publications produced by Ethiopian scholars and printed by national publishers. The Forum for Social Studies is one key place to […]
Tags: #Anthropology #Dawuro #Ethiopia #Ethnography #Social Hierarchy
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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