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Language & Governance in the African Experience
Notes from The Power of Babel: Language & Governance in the African Experience (1998) by Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui” “One of the gross linguistic anomalies of post-colonial Africa, in fact, is that whole classes of countries are named after the imperial language they have adopted as their official language. We do constantly refer […]
Globalization and Seed Sovereignty
Walshe’s “Globalisation and seed sovereignty in sub-Saharan Africa” (2019) explores some of the contestations and contradictions that exist between globalization and sovereignty (Ch 1), sovereignty in a globalized world (Ch 2), and seed sovereignty (Ch 3). The book provides two country case studies on Kenya (Ch 4) and Ethiopia (Ch 5), exploring their respective laws / regulations / proclamations […]
When Victims Become Killers
Mahmoud Mamdani should be on every essential reading list, whether that is African Studies (with When Victims Become Killers), colonialism and colonization (with Citizen and Subject) or political science (with Good Muslim, Bad Muslim). For anyone interested in Rwanda, the genocide, colonization and identity, When Victims Become Killers (2001) is required reading. A detailed history […]
Participatory Development Practice
Book review: Kelly, Anthony and Westoby, Peter. 2018: Participatory Development Practice: Using Traditional and Contemporary Frameworks. There is an emerging recognition that many of the ideas, practices and approaches within development studies and practice can replicate colonial attitudes, be paternalistic and disempowering, and may entrench marginalization. The emergence of a wide array of participatory methodologies […]
The Liberal Virus
For additional background on Samir Amin see my posts on Unequal Development (1976) and Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (1997). Some notes from his 2004 book “The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World”: “Towards the end of the twentieth century a sickness struck the world. Not everyone died, but all […]
Capitalism in the Age of Globalization
Samir Amin (1931-2018) spent his life research, writing and acting against capitalism, in particular highlighting how exploitative is it for the peripheries of the system. On this, Unequal Development (1976), is one of the earlier important works. In its place, he advocated for a socialist system. In the 1970s he introduced the term “eurocentrism”, a […]
Critique of Black Reason
Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosophy, based at WistU in South Africa. He has authored a number of influential works (such as Necropolitics), but given the importance of his works, is not as widely read and taught as he should be. Fortunately for English readers, his two recent books have been translated by published by […]
Who Owns the Problem?
A common theme of the lectures Pius Adesanmi gave was on narrative ownership. Much is said about Africa, but those stories often are crafted elsewhere. That is not to say that Africans do not produce narrative, he also shows, but that such narratives do not transverse the global wires as the others do, and thereby […]
Decolonization and the Decolonized
Albert Memmi is well known for his book The Colonizer and The Colonized (1957). As a kind of follow-on “Decolonization and the Decolonized” (2004 French, 2006 translation), I had high expectations for this book (and had not having read the reviews). After reading the book, and now having looked at reader reviews and comments, I […]
A Social History of Land Reform in Ethiopia
Siegfried Pausewang (1937-2012) was one of the leading European scholars of Ethiopia, with contributions made over decades. His engagement in Ethiopia began in the late 1960s, as a professor at the then Haile Selassie University (now Addis Ababa University). This post covers “Peasants, Land and Society: A Social History of Land Reform in Ethiopia” (1983), […]
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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