Politics
A Decade of Ethiopia: Politics, Economy and Society
As appears in Progress in Development Studies 18(2): 147-14. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1464993417749150 Abbink, Jon. 2017: A Decade of Ethiopia: Politics, Economy and Society 2004-2016. Leiden: Brill. 253 pp. $24.00. ISBN: 9789004345881. Ethiopia is a country of contradictions. There have been sustained, high rates of macro-economic growth and progress on development indicators, with persistently high levels of poverty […]
The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies
Why are policies created they way they are? This question is particularly interesting when the policies do not appear to function well. It may be that the ‘failing’ policies are not actually failing, but serving another, often unstated, purpose. A classic, essential read on this question is “Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political […]
Tags: #Agricultural policy #Agriculture #Political Basis of Agricultural Policies #Politics #Power
The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions
In recent decades there has been a trend toward aligning or integrating military and humanitarian action. It has taken the form of militaries wanting to win hearts and minds, on one side, and humanitarian actors calling for military action on the other. “Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions” (2010), edited […]
Tags: #Emergency States #Humanitarian Interventions #Military intervention #Military-Humanitarian #Politics
The Politics of Development in Morocco
‘Doing development differently’ can be interpreted as redistributing power in a decentralized way, and ensuring broad participation. How do we move these ideas from paper to practice? And, are these two objectives (not explicit in the DDD manifesto, but common in the discourse) compatible? Third, are these approaches to ‘doing development differently’ effective pathways to arrive […]
Tags: #Decentralization #Doing Development Differently #International development #Morocco #Politics
Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few
Two of the prominent front runners of the US presidential election positions themselves as “anti-establishment” and campaigned to take away the power of the elites and return that power to the people. Reich’s recent book “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few” (2015) took on many of the issues; essentially questions about democracy, power, […]
Tags: #Capitalism #Elite #Politics #Power #Rules of the Game
The Politics of Evidence
Evidence is important. We want to know what we are doing works (or doesn’t work). But, what happens when particular types of evidence are required to get funding, and what impact does this have on the types of work that is supported by donors? These questions are engaged with in the edited volume “The Politics […]
Tags: #Cost effectiveness #Evidence #Politics #Social Justice #Value for Money
Post-doc: Power, Poverty & Politics
The International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam the Netherlands is seeking to fill three full-time (100%) vacancies for the position of Post-Doctoral Researcher for a two year period from 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2018. We welcome applications from prospective postdoc researchers who are interested in doing operational research on […]
Post-doc: State and Disintegration in the Middle East
The CEU Center for Religious Studies and the Institute for Advanced Study at CEU announce the launch of “Striking from the Margins: Religion, State and Disintegration in the Middle East,” a two-year research project commencing in September 2016 with a major grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The research program will host host […]
People of the Plow
James McCann’s People of the Plow (1995) presents the agricultural history of Ethiopia from 1800 to 1990. While historical, it is also in many ways anthropological, particularly in the parts wherein the author draws on years of fieldwork. What I found particularly interesting in the book is the broader discourse within which the book is […]
Tags: #Agriculture #Anthropology #Ethiopia #History #Politics
Two Faces of Civil Society
A number of authors promote civil society as a mechanism to improve aid: Dwyer (2015) argued it as an alternative to traditional, top-down aid, Roy, Negron-Gonzales, Opoku-Agyemang and Talwalker (2016) as poor people’s movements, Eyben (2014) of the people-centered alternative vision of civil society, and Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) about the necessity of collective action for democratic […]
Tags: #Civil society #Effective aid #International development #NGOs #Politics
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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