What do victors do after winning a war? "Governing After War - Rebel Victories and Post-War Statebuilding" by Shelley Liu (2024) begins to answer this question with two in-depth analysis (Zimbabwe and Liberia). The book emerges out of doctoral work she did at Harvard. The book is methodologically detailed, uses a range of methods, is intentional about choices and clearly written. Really well done. For anyone looking for evidence on post-conflict statebuilding, this is excellent, and for doctoral students this is an exemplary guide to follow. A couple of notes:

"This book explores how war time processes affect post-war state building efforts by examining the governing strategies of rebel groups that win control of the state. Post-war governance is a continuation of war: though violence has ceased, the victor must consolidate its control over the state through a process of internal conquest. This means carefully making choices about resource allocation toward development and security." (p. v)

"One solution to the problem of strong top- down control from an illiberal rebel regime may be to implement local community programs to build a strong civil society. However, it is not enough to simply prescribe international engagement in local communities. An important aspect of my argument is that my attention must be paid to where these efforts are targeted, depending on the policy's goals. I demonstrate in this book that the international community must contend with the double-edged sword of grassroots citizen political action. Ultimately, if grievances risk fanning the flames of renewed conflict after war has officially ended, then post-war efforts should focus on ensuring peaceful political participation from a vibrant civil society rather than violent participation from a resentful one. Thus international post-war reconstruction efforts should include civil society development to promote democracy and peace." (p. 263) 

One of the classic critiques of scholarship on Africa (and conceptualizations thereof more broadly) was penned by the Congolese scholar (and Duke professor) V. Y. Mudimbe in his "The Invention of Africa" (1988), which was followed by this book, "The Idea of Africa" (1994). This book revolves around the idea of "Africa" as an idea, meaning how it has been employed historically, through cultural expressions and so forth. Landmark contributions, as these are, often appear less groundbreaking when read decades later, which is more a product of the mode of critique becoming much more integrated into our thinking than it does the uniqueness of the day. A few notes:

"As I read some critics of my books, my first reaction was to remain silent. To use a metaphor, why should I be forced to play chess with people who do not seem to know the rules of the game? In effect, beyond positivism, I have been trying to understand the powerful yet invisible epistemological order that seems to make possible, at a given period, a given type of discourse about Africa - or, for that matter, about any social group in Africa, Asia, or Europe." (p. xiv)

"A comprehensive study of the "terra nullius" politics by Keller, Lisitzyn, and Mann (1938) indicates that between 1400 and 1800 not one non-European nations was considered to have the right "to possess or to transfer any dominion in the international law sense."" (p. 33)

"The sequence of analyses in this book has focused on two main significant issues: first, the Greco-Roman thematization of otherness and its articulation in such concepts as 'barbarism' and 'savagery'; second, the complex process that has organized in Europe the idea of Africa. It is, in any case, troubling to note that since the fifteenth century the will to truth in Europe seems to espouse perfectly a will to power." (p. 212)

Turkish-American economist and recent Nobel prize winner, Daron Acemoglu, along with British-American economist and also recent Nobel prize winner, Simon Johnson, penned the 2023 book Power and Progress. Given the star power, one starts the book with high expectations. There are a number of books that survey the history of innovation, such as Ridley's 2020 How Innovation Works. In this case, the focus is inclusive innovation that benefits a broader number of people in society, as opposed to innovation that benefits a few (and potentially harms the majority). Like Ridley's book, it is a mass market book that tells stories of innovation. Also like Ridley's book, the book is general selects positive cases from the West and negative cases from the rest and ends up with quite normative or ideological takeaways, as opposed to findings rooted in the evidence from the book / drawn out from the examples on innovation that are surveyed (that coming from a reader who has not won a Nobel!). The key solutions proposed by the authors include: increase people power via unions, increase civil society action and organizing, create incentives for social good, break up big tech, reform taxes to align labor and capital, invest in people / workers, enhance data protection, and the need for government leadership. A few notes:

"There is reason to be hopeful because history also teaches us that a more inclusive vision that listens to a broader set of voices and recognizes the effects on every one is possible. Shared prosperity is more likely when countervailing powers hold entrepreneurs and technology leaders accountable-and push production methods and innovation in a more worker-friendly direction. Inclusive visions do not avoid some of the thorniest questions, such as whether the benefits that some reap justify the costs that others suffer. But they ensure that social decisions recognize their full consequences and without silencing those who do not gain." (p. 29)

"By the mid-nineteenth century; tens of thousands of middle-status Britons had formed the idea that they could rise substantially above their station through entrepreneurship and command of technologies. Other parts of Western Europe saw a similar process of social hierarchies loosening and ambitious men (and rarely women in those patriarchal times) wishing to gain wealth or status. But nowhere else in the world at that time do we see so many middle-class people trying to pierce through the existing social hierarchy. It was these meddling sort of men who were critical for the innovations and the introduction of new technologies throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain." (p. 166)

I read this book in an appropriate location, while on a recent trip to Malaysia, where this book was penned. Syed Muhammad Naquib al Attas is a Malaysian philosopher and has written a list of publications, this book, "Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam - An Exposition on the Fundamental Elements of the Worldview of Islam", was published in 2001. It emerges out of talks he gave, which expanded into a series of chapters. The book is deeply philosophical, and covers topics of worldview, knowing, being and existence. As much as Amazon might pose challenges to some smaller publishers, it also enables these books to become more accessible, as the original publisher, Dar Al-Risala Publishing, retains copyright but this was printed and distributed by Amazon (expanding access to markets and people that likely would not have otherwise been able to access it). This is a book for those interested in the deep end of Islamic philosophy.

"From the perspective of Islām, a 'worldview' is not merely the mind's view of the physical world and of man's historical, social, political and cultural involvement in it as reflected, as for example, in the current arabic expression of the idea formulated in the phrase nazrat al-islām li al-kawn. It is incorrect to refer to the worldview of Islām as a nazrat al-islām li al-kawn. This is because, unlike what is conveyed by nazrat the worldview of Islām is not based upon philosophical speculation formulated mainly from observation of the data of sensible experience, of what is visible to the eye; nor is it restricted to kawn, which is the world of sensible experience, the world of created things. If such expressions are now in use in arabic contemporary Muslim thought, it only demonstrates that we are already being unduly influenced by the modern, secular Western Scientific conception of the world that is restricted to the world of sense and sensible experience." (p. 1)