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Necropolitics
Achille Mbembe is not as well-known as he should be. One reason is that much of his work is written in French (although more translations are becoming available). I suspect this Cameroonian philosopher and critical scholar will become increasingly well-known in the years to come. This is essential reading (as is his Critique of Black […]
Tags: #Achille Mbembe #Colonization #Democratic values #Necropolitics #Racism
State-Peasant Relations in the Ethiopian Highlands
One of the leading anthropologists of northern Ethiopia, Svein Ege, edited “Land Tenure Security: State-Peasant Relations in the Amhara Highlands, Ethiopia” (2019), with contributions by Svein Ege, Harald Aspen, Kjell Havnevik and the late Yigremew Adal. For anyone interested in issues of land tenure and land security, particularly in highland Ethiopia, this is essential reading. I […]
Tags: #Ethiopia #Highlands #Svein Ege #Tenure #Tenure Security
Resisting Rural Dispossession
Dip Kapoor brought together a collective of works that highlight many stories that have not been widely told, stories of localized resistance to large-scale land acquisitions and land grabs. These processes have occasionally included these actors, but often presented them as victims without agency, not actors expressing their agency. In this regard, “Against Colonization and […]
Tags: #Gender #Inequality #Land Grab #Resistance #Rural Dispossession
The Art of the Impossible
I do not have a background in the arts or theatre, and have not done enough reading in my own time to know much of it, which is probably one of the reasons why I kept hearing of Vaclav Havel, but not knowing much of his works. Recently, I came across Havel as he has greatly […]
Tags: #Democracy #Politics #Responsibility #The Art of the Impossible #Vaclav Havel
Secular Translations
A couple of notes from Talal Asad’s “Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self and Calculative Reason” (2018): “Today an important failure is our inability to create a form of collective life on this planet radically different from the liberal capitalist states in which we live. The failure seems to be due not to any lack of […]
Tags: #Capitalism #Language #Liberalism #Secular Translations #Talal Asad
Xala
From Sembene Ousmane’s 1974 novel Xala, translated in 1976 to English: “The colonialist is stronger, more powerful than ever before, hidden inside us, here in this very place.” (p. 84) “All your past wealth – for you have nothing left – was acquired by cheating. You and your colleagues build on the misfortunes of honest, […]
Tags: #Colonialism #Decolonizing #Oppression #Sembene Ousmane #Xala
About me
Logan Cochrane
Logan is a 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 twenty 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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