Thought Provokers
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
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
About me
Logan Cochrane
Logan is a 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 twenty 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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