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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy
One of the key figures developing the Open Marxism school, Werner Bonefeld, wrote a sort of introductory level textbook “Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy – On Subversion and Negative Reason” (2014). The book generally builds on and critiques Marxist thought. It might be useful for an introduction, but a decade later this […]
Somali Poetry
Andrzejewski (1922-1994) spent an academic career studying Somalia. He first went to Somalia in 1950. This book, Somali Poetry, was published in 1993. It is a compilation of translated poems, with a little commentary on the text and brief notes about the poets. The poems themselves largely focus on camels, women and war (he writes […]
Governing After War
What do victors do after winning a war? “Governing After War – Rebel Victories and Post-War Statebuilding” by Shelley Liu (2024) begins to answer this question with two in-depth analysis (Zimbabwe and Liberia). The book emerges out of doctoral work she did at Harvard. The book is methodologically detailed, uses a range of methods, is […]
The Idea of Africa
One of the classic critiques of scholarship on Africa (and conceptualizations thereof more broadly) was penned by the Congolese scholar (and Duke professor) V. Y. Mudimbe in his “The Invention of Africa” (1988), which was followed by this book, “The Idea of Africa” (1994). This book revolves around the idea of “Africa” as an idea, […]
Power and Progress
Turkish-American economist and recent Nobel prize winner, Daron Acemoglu, along with British-American economist and also recent Nobel prize winner, Simon Johnson, penned the 2023 book Power and Progress. Given the star power, one starts the book with high expectations. There are a number of books that survey the history of innovation, such as Ridley’s 2020 […]
Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam
I read this book in an appropriate location, while on a recent trip to Malaysia, where this book was penned. Syed Muhammad Naquib al Attas is a Malaysian philosopher and has written a list of publications, this book, “Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam – An Exposition on the Fundamental Elements of the Worldview of […]
The World For Sale
This is a 2021 Oxford University Press book, which I expected to more on the academic end but leans toward storytelling and a mass market book. The stories are interesting and well told. Book might be a good audiobook for trains or driving. Written by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, both are journalists. “Without the […]
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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