Africa
Forests to the Foreigners: Large-Scale Land Acquisitions in Gabon
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/10/4/420 Abstract: For the past decade, the land rush discourse has analyzed foreign investment in land and agriculture around the world, with Africa being a continent of particular focus due to the scale of acquisitions that have taken place. Gabon, a largely forested state in Central Africa, has been neglected in the land rush conversations, […]
Tags: #Africa #Gabon #Land Grab #Land grabbing #Large-scale land acquisitions
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 […]
Tags: #Africa #decolonization #Language #Mazrui #The Power of Babel
Human Rights in Africa
Bonny Ibhawoh’s (2018) “Human Rights in Africa” is a long overdue contribution to the human rights discourse. This is not only a critical assessment of the dominant narrative about the origins of human rights as known today, but also a call for revival of knowing histories that are not well known, prioritized or taught. The […]
Tags: #Africa #History #Human Rights #Vernacularization #Vernacularizing
Evaluation Landscape in Africa
Thousands of evaluations have been conducted across Africa, producing large amounts of knowledge. However, these reports are not often captured and shared nor are they easily accessible, nor are always made available to the public. There is no search platform, like Web of Science for academic publications, for evaluations. Some donors have created their own databases, but […]
Tags: #Africa #Capacity #Evaluation #Evaluation Landscape #M&E
(Still) Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment
In the 80s and 90s an emerging set of research began to highlight that much of what we thought we knew about the environment in Africa, was, at best, only partially accurate. This had implications for policy and programs – and in some instances these narratives are still present. “The Lie of the Land: Challenging […]
Tags: #Africa #Environment #False Narratives #Myths #Soil Erosion
A Socialist Peace? Explaining the Absence of War
Recently published as: Cochrane, L. (2018) Review: A Socialist Peace? Explaining the Absence of War in an African Country. Progress in Development Studies 18(3): 214-215. McGovern, Mike. 2017. A Socialist Peace? Explaining the Absence of War in an African Country. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 249 pp. $ 30.00 (paper). ISBN: 9780226453606 Many studies have […]
Stranglehold on Africa
In 1962 Rene Dumont wrote False Start in Africa, which offered unique perspectives for the time period, many of which continue to be relevant. I picked up “Stranglehold on Africa” by Rene Dumont and Marie-France Mottin (1983) hoping to find an equally interesting ideas. I did not find it as good as the earlier work. […]
Tags: #Africa #Agriculture #Development Studies #Rene Dumont #Stranglehold on Africa
Civil Wars in Africa: Roots and Resolutions
For some period in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a trend in conflict studies that suggested civil war in Africa was externally caused and driven. To counter that narrative, a group of scholars came together to explore the internal, domestic aspects of civil war in Africa (without neglecting the external factors). The result was […]
Tags: #Africa #Civil war #Conflict #Managing conflict #Preventing conflict
False Start in Africa (1962)
Rene Dumont’s “False Start in Africa” (1962) is arguably one of the most influential and widely read texts on agriculture in Africa. The book is more of a conversation, than it is an academic text. However, Dumont was a pioneering voice for identifying key issues such as soil erosion, micronutrient deficiencies, soil type and quality […]
Tags: #Africa #Agriculture #False Start in Africa #Rene Dumont #Rural Development
Post-doc: African Studies
The Africana Research Center invites applications for a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in any aspect of African, African American and Diaspora Studies, beginning August 2017. During their residency, fellows have no teaching or administrative responsibilities, though they may request a teaching assignment. They will be matched with a mentor, attend professional development sessions and other relevant […]
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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