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Tocqueville in Arabia
I opened Joshua Mitchell’s “Tocqueville in Arabia: The Anxieties of the Democratic Age” (original 2013 by UChicago Press, reprint in 2023 with Encounter Books) skeptical. The author spent 3 years in Qatar in the mid-2000s and runs the risk of pretending to a be country expert (as many fly-in fly-out scholars have done). Fortunately, I […]
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
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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