Democracy
Democracy and Development in Africa
While a visiting scholar at Brookings, Claude Ake wrote “Democracy and Development in Africa” (1995), published by Brookings. As nearly three decades have passed, I focus less on the specifics (e.g., agricultural policy recommendations) and highlight the general arguments, a few notes: “Many factors have been offered to explain the apparent failure of the development […]
Tags: #Africa #Claude Ake #Democracy #Development #Ideology of development
Elections and Development in Africa
What does democracy / democratization result in within African contexts? Robin Harding argues that due to the increase of elections, combined with a majority of many countries being rural, is an increase in rural interests as an outcome. The answer is summarized in his 2020 book “Rural Democracy: Elections and Development in Africa”, which is […]
Tags: #Africa #Democracy #elections #Robin Harding #Rural Bias
How to Rig an Election
“The greatest political paradox of our time is this: there are more elections than ever before, and yet the world is becoming less democratic” (p. 1). This paradox is explained in How to Rig an Election (2018) by Cheeseman and Klaas (published by Yale). In sum: “How is it possible that the flourishing of elections […]
Tags: #Democracy #elections #fraud #hacking the election #How to rig an election
Democracy Project
Starting in 2001 Teodros Kiros began writing articles in Ethiopian newspapers, as a way to engage with the public about democracy and democratization. The articles continued until 2004, and are gathered in his book “Philosophical Essays” (2011). The series of articles are short interventions, and are largely an introduction to Euro-Western thinkers, or a sort […]
Tags: #Democracy #Democracy Project #Ethiopia #Philosophical Essays #Teodros Kiros
Democracy in Chains
Nearly on a weekly basis during the Trump years we heard pundits proclaim something along the lines of “who saw it coming?!” While the specifics were not predictable, the trend was clear. One of those for whom the writing was on the wall was historian and public policy expert Nancy MacLean, who published Democracy in […]
Tags: #Buchanan #Charles Koch #Democracy #Liberty #Nancy MacLean
The Green Book – Gaddafi
The former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi explained his political philosophy in The Green Book. The Green Book is a short work (the English translation is 92 pages) presented in short chapters on a wide range of topics, organized into three parts. The first part is a critique of Western forms of democracy and a proposal […]
Tags: #Democracy #Gaddafi #Green Book #Just Share #Socialist Society
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 […]
Tags: #Democracy #Politics #Responsibility #The Art of the Impossible #Vaclav Havel
How Democracies Die
We tend to assume that democratic processes, norms and structures are ‘sticky’ and rarely ‘die’. The cases we might think about are those that ended due to war and conflict, with the emergence of dictatorship in the form of fascism or military rule. In “How Democracies Die” (2018) Levitsky and Ziblatt provide a clear counter-narrative, […]
Tags: #Democracy #Governance #Norms #Political Science #Politics
Listening to the Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy
Arundhati Roy’s “Listening to the Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy” (2009) is a collection of essays, written during the 2000s. The topics span a range of issues, largely occurring in India. While the “field notes on democracy” were present, they were often implicit – which is somehow expected as the content was not written as […]
Tags: #Arundhati Roy #Civil disobedience #Democracy #India #Nonviolence
From Bullets to the Ballot Box
Kinfe Abraham (1950-2007) was one of Ethiopia’s leading academics, although his books are not well known outside of the country. In this post I pull some though provoking quotes and ideas from his 1994 publication “Ethiopia from Bullets to the Ballot Box: The Bumpy Road to Democracy and the Political Economy of Transition”. The book […]
Tags: #Democracy #Ethiopia #History #Kinfe Abraham #Resettlement
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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