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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), […]
Zara Yacob: Rationality of the Human Heart
Zara Yacob was an Ethiopian philosopher, a rationalist thinking who wrote nearly a hundred years before Descartes. Claude Sumner has written extensively about Zara Yacob, devoting a career to Ethiopian philosophy and penning many books. Kiros says “Sumner is right when he contended that Zara Yacob along with Descartes was a founder of modern philosophy” […]
Silences in NGO Discourses
Issa G. Shivji is one of East Africa’s well-known critical scholars, researchers and professors. Much of his work has appeared in shorter essay form, as opposed to academic articles or books (although he has published several books as well). “Silences in NGO Discourses: The Role and Future of NGOs in Africa” (2007) is one of […]
Discourse on Colonialism
Aime Cesaire is one of the great voices of the anti-colonial struggle and was the teacher of Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks & The Wretched of the Earth). Cesaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism” was originally published in French in 1950, the English version I am using was translated in 1972 and republished in 2000. For the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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