Power
Sweetness and Power
The American Anthropologist Sidney Mintz (1922-2015) spent a career understanding and writing about the intersections between food, slavery and colonialism, largely in the Caribbean. His book Sweetness and Power (1985) is one of the most widely read and influential books in cultural anthropology. Mintz takes Anthropologists to task for often being ahistorical, in the introduction […]
Tags: #Colonialism #Food #Power #Slavery #Sugar
New Publication: Searching for Social Justice in GIScience
Article is available here, from Cartography and Geographic Information Science. Abstract: Maps are explicitly positioned within the realms of power, representation, and epistemology; this article sets out to explore how these ideas are manifest in the academic Geographic Information Science (GIScience) literature. We analyze 10 years of literature (2005–2014) from top tier GIScience journals specific […]
Tags: #Empowerment #GIScience #Marginalization #Power #Social Justice
Co-opting Aid for Political Purposes
Guest blog on WhyDev: Donors face difficult challenges. Sometimes they face choices between conflicting priorities. For example: (1) governments should have the right to determine how and where resources are used, and (2) individual human rights should be upheld and protected. These principles often conflict, particularly in countries where democratic governance is weak. Rosalind Eyben […]
Tags: #International development #Politics #Power #Practice #Process
Contesting Power
Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail (2012) offers insight into why wealth and poverty exists (see post here). It also provides direction as to how more inclusive political and economic institutions are formed, which draws on their 2006 book, On the Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship. They open with a comment about the Arab Spring: […]
Tags: #Democracy #Inclusive #Institutions #Power #Rule of law
Why Nations Fail
Why Nations Fail (2012), by Acemoglu and Robinson, is probably one of the most influential development studies books of the last decade. Although the idea itself is not new, the authors make a details and persuasive argument that institutions are a primary reason for national wealth and poverty. They write: “The central thesis of this […]
Tags: #Economic growth #Institutions #Politics #Power #Why Nations Fail
Power tends to corrupt…
Fiction (1945): “…out from the door of the farmhouse came a long file of pigs, all walking on their hind legs…out came Napoleon himself, majestically upright, casting haughty glances from side to side, and with his dogs gambolling round him. He carried a whip in his trotter. There was a deadly silence. Amazed, terrified, huddling […]
Ethiopia’s Safety Net: Power, Politics and Practice
Cochrane, L. and Tamiru, Y. (2016) Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program: Power, Politics and Practice. Journal of International Development 28(5): 649-665. Abstract With one third of the population living in poverty and millions experiencing chronic food insecurity, the government of Ethiopia faces difcult and complex challenges. One of the most robust and effective social protection […]
Tags: #Ethiopia #Participation #Politics #Power #Productive Safety Net Program
Navigating Complexity in International Development
Danny Burns and Stuart Worsley offer one of the best development studies reads of 2015 with their book “Navigating Complexity in International Development: Facilitating Sustainable Change at Scale.” There are shelves of books that cover similar topics in development studies, with much repetition and little innovative thinking. Burns and Stuart offer just that by viewing […]
Tags: #Complex systems #Complexity #International development #Power #Sustainability
Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
Acemoglu and Robinson are most well known for their book Why Nations Fail. This thought provoker post covers an earlier work, from 2006: Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Parts of this book are heavy with the formulas; so those wary of economics and mathematics, and interested in more of the social sciences side of political […]
Tags: #Democracy #Dictatorship #Institutions #Middle Class #Power
Yemen and the Politics of Permanent Crisis
Before the onset of the 2015 Yemeni war, the situation in the country was dire: it was home to one of the world’s highest rates of child malnutrition, was chronically food insecure, depleting oil and water resources, corruption and long-term instability. Sarah Phillips explores these dynamics in her work “Yemen and the Politics of Permanent […]
Tags: #Instability #Politics #Politics of Permanent Crisis #Power #Yemen
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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