Thought Provokers
Sweetness and Power
The American Anthropologist Sidney Mintz (1922-2015) spent a career understanding and writing about the intersections between food, slavery and colonialism, largely in the Caribbean. His book Sweetness and Power (1985) is one of the most widely read and influential books in cultural anthropology. Mintz takes Anthropologists to task for often being ahistorical, in the introduction […]
Tags: #Colonialism #Food #Power #Slavery #Sugar
World-system Analysis
Immanuel Wallerstein, an American sociologist at Yale, developed the world-systems approach, which he has written about and developed for more than four decades –first published in The Modern World-System in 1974. In 2004 he authored World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction as a means to present the theory in a concise way, largely for those unfamiliar with […]
Tags: #Capitalism #Immanuel Wallerstein #Interdisciplinary #Participation #World-system
Does Development Aid Violence?
Peter Uvin’s “Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda” (1999), should be read by all students, practitioners and scholars of development studies. The book offers unique perspectives on the linkages between development activity and politics, power, exclusion, marginalization and processes that generally counter the objectives of the development enterprise, and specifically the Rwandan genocide.The book […]
Tags: #Aid #Development Studies #Genocide #International development #Violence
Contesting Power
Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail (2012) offers insight into why wealth and poverty exists (see post here). It also provides direction as to how more inclusive political and economic institutions are formed, which draws on their 2006 book, On the Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship. They open with a comment about the Arab Spring: […]
Tags: #Democracy #Inclusive #Institutions #Power #Rule of law
Why Nations Fail
Why Nations Fail (2012), by Acemoglu and Robinson, is probably one of the most influential development studies books of the last decade. Although the idea itself is not new, the authors make a details and persuasive argument that institutions are a primary reason for national wealth and poverty. They write: “The central thesis of this […]
Tags: #Economic growth #Institutions #Politics #Power #Why Nations Fail
Power tends to corrupt…
Fiction (1945): “…out from the door of the farmhouse came a long file of pigs, all walking on their hind legs…out came Napoleon himself, majestically upright, casting haughty glances from side to side, and with his dogs gambolling round him. He carried a whip in his trotter. There was a deadly silence. Amazed, terrified, huddling […]
Letting them Die – Why Programs Fail
“In the old South Africa we killed people. Now we’re just letting them die.” – Pieter-Dirk Uys In her 2003 book, ‘Letting them Die’: Why HIV/AIDS Prevention Programmes Fail, Catherine Campbell describes how “the best-intentioned programmes, even when they achieve high levels of mobilization of the least-powerful sectors of small local communities, may have […]
Tags: #Failure #International development #Participation #social capital #Stakeholders
The Making of a Better World
Rosalind Eyben spent a career as a practitioner in international development and then as an academic on the subject. Her 2014 book, “International Aid and the Making of a Better World: Reflexive Practice” is one of the few books that critically self-analyzes a personal trajectory. Unlike some personal journals/journeys of aid workers, this focuses upon […]
Tags: #Gender #Human Rights #International development #Participation #Reflexivity
Infections and Inequalities
An essential read, whether you are in development studies, anthropology or medicine, is Paul Farmer’s Infections and Inequalities (1999). “This book examines inequalities in the distribution and outcome of infectious diseases. It asks why people like Annette Jean and her siblings are likely to die of infections such as tuberculosis and AIDS and malaria, while […]
Tags: #Anthropology #Cost effectiveness #Gender #Inequality #Paul Farmer
The Anatomy of Giving
Most of the time development folks just speak with and to other development folks. Outsiders can bring a healthy voice to the conversation. Augusta Dwyer, in her 2015 work “The Anatomy of Giving” offers such a perspective on the aid industry, focusing upon Haiti. With a background as a journalist, she sets out to answer […]
Tags: #Aid #Anatomy of Giving #Civil society #Empowerment #International development
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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