Thought Provokers
Life After Violence: Burundi
What happens after conflict ends? How are lives changed, perceptions altered and the future envisioned? Peter Uvin held hundreds of interviews in Burundi to find out in his book “Life After Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi” (2009). The author presents “a snapshot of life as lived and analyzed by ordinary Burundians” being “based on […]
Tags: #Burundi #Conflict #International development #Uvin #Violence
The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice
The World Bank is a favorite target of criticism. Yet, few actually know how the massive organization operates, externally or internally. Michael Goldman set out to do present this information, and specifically in the context of the ‘greening’ of the World Bank (or its development and promotion of “green neoliberalism”) and its funding whereby it […]
Tags: #Development Studies #Ethnography #International development #Social Justice #World Bank
Resources on Seasonality
Robert Chambers states that “As a dimension of poverty, seasonality is as glaringly obvious as it is still grossly neglected. Attempts to embed its recognition in professional mindsets, policy and practices have still a long way to go” (Chambers, 2012: xv; in the Forward of Devereux, Sabates-Wheeler and Longhurst, 2012). This quote comes from an […]
Tags: #Agriculture #Food Security #Livelihoods #Rural Development #Seasonality
People of the Plow
James McCann’s People of the Plow (1995) presents the agricultural history of Ethiopia from 1800 to 1990. While historical, it is also in many ways anthropological, particularly in the parts wherein the author draws on years of fieldwork. What I found particularly interesting in the book is the broader discourse within which the book is […]
Tags: #Agriculture #Anthropology #Ethiopia #History #Politics
Essential Reference on Food Security
For those interested in, doing research on, or teaching about food security, Mark Gibson’s “The Feeding of Nations: Redefining Food Security for the 21st Century” (2012) is an essential reference to have. The book is a hardcover 640-page academic work, and unfortunately not cheap. There are a couple of ways to access the ideas if […]
Tags: #Agriculture #Food Security #Food Studies #Nutrition #Technology
Enemies of Innovation
Dr. Calestous Juma’s new book, “Innovation and its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies” (2016), explains that this is a book Dr. Juma has wanted to write since his early engagement with innovation. That includes his founding of the African Centre for Technology Studies in 1988, being a former Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological […]
Two Faces of Civil Society
A number of authors promote civil society as a mechanism to improve aid: Dwyer (2015) argued it as an alternative to traditional, top-down aid, Roy, Negron-Gonzales, Opoku-Agyemang and Talwalker (2016) as poor people’s movements, Eyben (2014) of the people-centered alternative vision of civil society, and Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) about the necessity of collective action for democratic […]
Tags: #Civil society #Effective aid #International development #NGOs #Politics
Encountering Development
One of the books commonly cited and recommended in critical development studies circles is Arturo Escobar’s Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995). Escobar is a Colombian-American Anthropologist, who interestingly started his academic career in chemical engineering. The award-winning book is typically summarized as reframing ‘development’ as a tool of control […]
Tags: #Accountability #Critical Studies #Development discourse #Encountering Development #International development
Envisioning Power
Anthropologist Eric Wolf (1923-1999) last book, Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Power (1999) is not his most well-known work, but is a book that should be read by those seeking to understand how anthropological studies, and comparative cultural studies, can contribute to our understand of power and politics and their relation to ideas and […]
Tags: #Anthropology #Culture #Ideology #Interdisciplinary #Power
Encountering Poverty
The 2016 book “Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World” brings together some of the insights draw from teaching in a critical undergraduate program. Roy, Negron-Gonzales, Opoku-Agyemang and Talwalker offer something between an edited volume and an undergraduate textbook, while also offering critical reflexivity of their own roles and positionality. The target audience […]
Tags: #Complexity #Education #International development #Poverty #Reflexivity
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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