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4IR: Reinventing a Nation
I recently had the opportunity to meet Dato Rais Hussin and he shared his 2019 book 4IR (AI, Blockchain, FinTech, IoT) Reinventing a Nation. The book is co-edited with Dinis Guarda and has a range of contributions from experts on topics from education to technical domains. After the launch of GPT in Nov 2022, AI […]
Understanding Environmental Policy Processes
Policy books on specific issues with specific cases tend to have a shorter shelf life of relevance. Keeley and Scoones wrote “Understanding Environmental Policy Processes: Cases from Africa” in 2003, and it largely falls in this category. The book has three cases as chapters (Ethiopia, Mali, Zimbabwe) and some general chapters on knowledge, power and […]
Tags: #Agricultural Policy #Environmental Policy #Ethiopia #Policy #Policy Networks
Overcoming Smallness
What particular challenges do “small states” have and what options might they employ to overcome them? Building out of a collaborative teaching class, Miller and Al-Marri (2022) wrote “Overcoming Smallness”. The book offers a useful introduction to the literature on small states, with Chapter 1 on what small states are (and debates about that), Chapters 2 and 3 […]
Tags: #Fahad Al-Marri #Overcoming Smallness #Qatar #Rory Miller #Small states
Teaching Interculturally in Qatar
Qatar has unique traits that make some areas of inquiry particularly relevant. That the citizen population is a minority and that there are so many international K-12 schools as well as international university branch campuses, the country is very well suited to explore education, identity and language questions. Wisam Abdul-Jabbar edited a 2025 book delving […]
Tags: #Education #Inclusion #Interculturally #Interculture #Qatar
Invention and Innovation
Vaclav Smil, prolific author of several best selling book, published “Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure” (2023) with MIT Press. The book presents a three-part approach to assessing invention and innovation, which examines: (1) inventions that works but we later learned caused harm – leaded gasoline, DDT, CFCs; (2) Inventions we […]
Tags: #Failure #Innovation #Invention #Invention and Innovation #Vaclav Smil
Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy
One of the key figures developing the Open Marxism school, Werner Bonefeld, wrote a sort of introductory level textbook “Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy – On Subversion and Negative Reason” (2014). The book generally builds on and critiques Marxist thought. It might be useful for an introduction, but a decade later this […]
Tags: #Critical Theory #Marxism #Marxist #Political Economy #Werner Bonefeld
Somali Poetry
Andrzejewski (1922-1994) spent an academic career studying Somalia. He first went to Somalia in 1950. This book, Somali Poetry, was published in 1993. It is a compilation of translated poems, with a little commentary on the text and brief notes about the poets. The poems themselves largely focus on camels, women and war (he writes […]
Governing After War
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 […]
Tags: #Governing after War #Post-War #Shelley Liu #Statebuilding
The Idea of Africa
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, […]
Tags: #Africa #History #Mudimbe #Otherness #The Idea of Africa
Power and Progress
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 […]
Tags: #Acemoglu #Inclusive innovation #Innovation #Power and Progress #Simon Johnson
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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