Thought Provokers
Adjustment with a Human Face
Anyone who has taken a development studies class has most likely heard about the failure of the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). Indeed, these programs caused significant harm to the most vulnerable in society. Yet, far too often students are only given a brief summary supported by carefully selected examples (that the World Bank is bad […]
Tags: #Adjustment with a Human Face #Structural Adjustment #Structural Adjustment Programs #UNICEF #World Bank
Can Trade Promote Development?
Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton wade through the debates and evidence in “Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development” (2005). The book aims to “describe how trade policies can be designed in the future with a view to helping the developing countries” including that “liberalization needs to be managed carefully – the task […]
Tags: #Comparative advantage #Development #Policy #Sustainable development #Trade
No is Not Enough
Naomi Klein has written some great books: “No Logo” (2000), “Shock Doctrine” (2008), and “This Changes Everything” (2014). She is a prolific writer, activist and regular on the speaker circuit. When I picked up “No is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need” (2017), I was surprised to see […]
Tags: #Counter narrative #Naomi Klein #No is not enough #Resistance #Trump
The Quest for Socialist Utopia
Bahru Zewde’s “The Quest for Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement c. 1960-1974” (2014) is brilliant. It is detailed, and may be of interest to a narrow audience as a result. However, this exploration of the student movement – leading up to the overthrow of the Imperial Regime in 1974 – is extremely well done, […]
Tags: #Ethiopia #History #Revolution #Socialism #Student Movement
The Great War of Africa
“Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa” by Jason K. Stearns (2011) “tells the story of the conflict that resulted from these regional, national, and local dimensions and that has lasted from 1996 until today” (p. 8). The author not only has a depth of […]
Indigenous Research Methodologies
A number of past posts presented books on decolonization – Fanon on struggles, Ngugi on language, and Smith on methodologies. How might a grounding in decolonization shape research? Margaret Kovach addresses this question in “Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts” (2009). In seeking to understand how Indigenous methodologies have been utilized in research, Kovach presents […]
Tags: #decolonization #Indigenous Methodologies #Indigenous Research Methodologies #Methodologies #Reflexivity
Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?
An article in the New York Times in 2015 provoked Michael Truscello and Ajamu Nangwaya to bring together the volume: “Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up? Organizing the Twenty-First Century Resistance” (2017). This book is divided into two sections, one on the Global North and another on the Global South, and is an “anthology of […]
Tags: #collective action #people power #Resistance #Social movements #Struggle
False Start in Africa (1962)
Rene Dumont’s “False Start in Africa” (1962) is arguably one of the most influential and widely read texts on agriculture in Africa. The book is more of a conversation, than it is an academic text. However, Dumont was a pioneering voice for identifying key issues such as soil erosion, micronutrient deficiencies, soil type and quality […]
Tags: #Africa #Agriculture #False Start in Africa #Rene Dumont #Rural Development
Citizen Action and National Policy Reform
“Citizen Action and National Policy Reform: Making Change Happen” (2010), edited by Gaventa and McGee, presents a series of case studies of citizen movements and advocacy for national policy change. The book fits well within the “How Change Happens” space. Cases are presented from: South Africa, Philippines, Mexico, Chile, India, Brazil, Morocco and Turkey. The […]
Tags: #Advocacy #Citizen Action #Civil society #How change happens #Policy
Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic
As other reviewers of this book have mentioned, there is probably few who are better suited to write this book than Paul Richards, with such a depth of knowledge and experience of the areas where the epidemic occurred. In “Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic” (2016) the author argues that faced “with […]
Tags: #Citizen science #Ebola #Epidemic #Public Health #Social science
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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