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Unthinking Social Science
Arguments aplenty about specific forms of biases; in “Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms” (1991) Immanuel Wallerstein suggests the problem runs much deeper. The paradigms / worldviews, and assumptions that uphold them, prevent us from truly understanding the world. Drawing upon Marxist thought and critique. Wallerstein offers the beginnings of arguments that would […]
Tags: #Racism #Underdevelopment #unthinking #unthinking social science #wallerstein
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Best-seller Yuval Noah Harari seemed to be riding the wave of his book selling popularity with his “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018), as this book largely pulls together previously published material for the book market. Granted I am picking this book up in 2023 and much has changed in the years since publication, […]
Power in the Age of AI
With all the talk of AI of recent, I picked up “Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (2023) by Paul Scharre to see where the new changes might fit into courses I have covered of recent (political economy, ethics, evaluation). A complaint to start: many figures in my copy of this book […]
Ali Shariati and the Future of Social Theory
Ali Shariati was an Iranian scholar and philosopher (1933-1977), argued to be one of the foremost intellectuals influencing the Iranian Revolution. Ali Shariati and the Future of Social Theory: Religion, Revolution, and the Role of the Intellectual (2017), edited by Byrd and Miri, revisits the ideas of Ali Shariati for contemporary and future of social sciences. […]
Tags: #Ali Shariati #Colonization #Exploitation #Faith #Social Theory
The Afghanistan File
Walking around a bookshop that largely carried children’s materials, I came across an interesting (and out of place) book: “The Afghanistan File” written by Prince Turki AlFaisal Al Saud, the Director of the General Intelligence Directorate (1977-2001) in Saudi Arabia. It seems the book was dictated by Prince Turki, written by Michael Field, and published […]
Tags: #Afghanistan #Saudi Arabia #Taliban #Turki Al Faisal Al Saud
Bad Samaritans
Ha-Joon Chang has written many excellent books, on this blog I have covered Kicking Away the Ladder and 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. With the encouragement of Oxfam’s Duncan Green, in 2007 Chang published “Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism”. The book aims for a […]
Tags: #Bad Samaritans #Capitalism #Free Trade Myth #Ha-Joon Chang #Neoliberalism
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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