I recently had the opportunity to meet Dato Rais Hussin and he shared his 2019 book 4IR (AI, Blockchain, FinTech, IoT) Reinventing a Nation. The book is co-edited with Dinis Guarda and has a range of contributions from experts on topics from education to technical domains. After the launch of GPT in Nov 2022, AI has been the center of attention. However, these authors were putting this on the agenda - particularly for Malaysia - in 2019. Importantly this is well beyond the technical or theoretical, but how the country can proactively create enabling environments for emerging technologies. Tech books quickly are out of date as the industry changes rapidly, even the duration of book publication poses a challenge. In this case, the governance side remains relevant while the tech has evolved and been widely integrated (in some areas the authors foresaw). A few notes:

"Despite the doom mongering, there will always be a human element in education. Technology is simply the facilitator of change not the controller of the classroom. That will always be the role of the teacher. The notion of favorite teacher will be as important for future generations as it has been in the past. It is highly unlikely that people will point to their favorite technology programme as an inspiration for entering a particular career path!" (p. 150)

"5 key factors for that social structure of innovation occur: the research universities; established entrepreneur businesses that operate as feeders; local venue capitalists; abundant talent; support institutions that comprise the key locational assets required to spawn and sustain the high tech industry. 30 years later, these are still the key ingredients of the modern tech city." (p. 225)

"... the social and ethical dimension of the 4IR needs to be taken into consideration when designing a 4IR tech hub's workforce, and certain types of start-upsworking with social innovation in fields such as well-being, education, and reskilling, need to be part of it., To establish partners with Universities is key and attracting graduates with degrees in creative areas and social science areas is also very important. These can provide, when working in partnership with the technology workforce, the much needed interdisciplinary research on lifelong education, social innovation and policy making that helps to tailor the development of technology for the best possible results that value growth and development also in terms of well-being." (p. 247)

Policy books on specific issues with specific cases tend to have a shorter shelf life of relevance. Keeley and Scoones wrote "Understanding Environmental Policy Processes: Cases from Africa" in 2003, and it largely falls in this category. The book has three cases as chapters (Ethiopia, Mali, Zimbabwe) and some general chapters on knowledge, power and politics; environmental policy processes; international policy processes; and a concluding chapter on engagement spaces. The Ethiopia case study brought out the naive and idealistic views, such as those pitched by Sasakawa Global 2000, suggesting that the addition of fertilizer would triple yields and "off the shelf" packages would increase maize yields tenfold. SG2000 was integrated in, and was the primary driver of, the expanded agricultural extension program of the then new Zenawi government. The influence was exerted by foreign consultants, often with World Bank and CG ties, to put SG2000 in this unique position of influencing power. The book offers some interesting historical notes of Zenawi visiting farms with Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug (in 1994). The authors suggest - in 2003 - a lot of money wasted and little progress. This book is interesting in that is looks at the role of networks in influencing or setting policy. One lengthy note in the Conclusion of the Ethiopia case:

"... the policy process - linked to agriculture, natural resources and environment in Ethiopia - is undoubtedly complex. Policy conflicts are not resolved, it seems, as a result of simple technical and rational choices between different alternatives. Policy is the stuff of politics and people, and of knowledge and power. The rise or fall of different policy emphases depends upon the successful (or otherwise) enrolment of actors - scientists, donors, politicians, NGO staff, farmers and others - and the creation of networks that are able to make use of a policy space, emerging as a result of particular contexts, circumstances and timings. Policies can be seen to be embedded in local settings - in the political histories of different regions, in the cultures of regional bureaucracies and administrations, and dependent upon the histories of educational advantage and disadvantage, as well as rooted in ideologies and practices of governance and participation. Policies, it seems, often have a certain inertia: particular ideas and practices stick, despite concerted challenges to basic concepts and ways of working. If actor networks are tightly formed and impenetrable, and contexts and circumstances are not conducive to change, no amount of rational argument will budge a policy from its pedestal. However, as we have noted, things do change once distinct and well-guarded policy positions begin to fall apart, and other arguments become incorporated, softening the stance and, through this process, enlarging the associated actor network. Key events may allow this to happen, creating new policy spaces and new opportunities for challenge and open debate. The result is often the partial unravelling of old actor networks and the creation of new ones around alternative policy discourses, which, previously, featured only on the fringes of mainstream policy discussion." (p. 97) 

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 cover economics and natural resources in small states, Chapters 4 and 5 explore security and alliances, and Chapters 6 and 7 delve into a country case study of Qatar. The case study engages the literature of the opening chapters, bridging the theory to an applied case. Might have been useful to use the case to have an additional chapter on how the case can inform the theory in new ways or offer new directions in small state research. A few notes:

"Knowledge is also an important resource that has provided the wherewithal for some small states such as Finland, Estonia, Taiwan and Ireland to innovate and gain influence in industries such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, telecommunications and cyber security. This has required investment in high quality education, human capital development and the building of quality institutional frameworks. This underscores another point, that the intangible resources developed by small states can be used in the innovation of new tangible resources." (p. 69-70)

"From the perspective of small state security studies, the blockade of Qatar is an excellent example of a crisis in which a larger opponent with expansionist or revisinis goals uses hybrid warfare to target a smaller state to achieve its strategic objectives. From the outset, the intention of blockading countries was to destabilize Qatar and pressure decision makers in Doha to Accede there demands. The overt and concord methods adopted by the Saudi-UAE led anti-Qatar coalition in pursuit of their goals included disinformation, cyber-attacks, economic pressure and diplomatic isolation at a level that, in the words of NATO definition of hybrid warfare, remained "below the threshold of formally declared warfare." (p. 125)

"With the start of the crisis, Qatar was transformed overnight from a pro-active international actor into a besieged small state in a hostile regional environment with little choice but to defend its core interest from the much smaller coalition raged against it. Yet despite the notable power imbalance from the duration of the blockade Qatar managed to contain successfully its negative impact, and to maintain its political autonomy and economic sovereignty. As previous chapters have noted, states that can achieve economic and political self-reliance will be more difficult external opponents to divide and rule than ones that are economically dependent on other actors." (p.134) 

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 into this topic, "Teaching Interculturally in Qatar", covering K12 as well as higher education. The book has 14 chapters, with seven parts of 2 chapters each. Part 1 covers cultural and educational ethics, Part 2 culture and religion in higher education, Part 3 on cultural identity, Part 4 on intercultural communication, Part 5 on intercultural competencies, Part 6 on media, and Part 7 on translation and language teaching. It is often the case that academics draw on lessons and best practices on multicultural education from countries such as Australia and Canada. This book shows that Qatar has much to offer, and in many regards a more inclusive form of intercultural engagement (which allows comparing and contrasting with the assimilationist melting pot approaches or togetherness in different salad bowl ideas).

As a counter narrative to the stereotypes of the region and country, Chapter 3 by Patrick Laude notes: "Islam is the official religion of the state in Qatar, and the presence of a Catholic University on its land may have suggested to some local constituencies an alarming potential for religious proselytization. The presence of Catholic priests on the faculty, as well as that of a multi‑confessional chapel in the Georgetown building in Doha, could have raised suspicion of religious apostolate. None of these features seems to have been a factor of controversy or disruption. Catholic priests on the faculty were generally well‑received by students. There was never any suspicion that they would be engaged in religious activities promoting their faith. The faculty priests were also involved in interfaith activities; some had a deep knowledge of Islam and the Islamic world. In parallel, Qatar had also positioned itself as a country fostering interfaith dialogue. The Doha International Center for Interfaith Dialogue was founded in 2010 under the aegis of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Since then, it has been at the forefront of interfaith activities in the country and abroad. It hosts a biennial interfaith conference, among many other community activities, and sponsors a journal of interreligious studies." (p. 33) 

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 expected to scale but did not - airships, nuclear fission, supersonic flight; (3) inventions that did materialize at all - hyperloop, nitrogen-fixing cereals, controlled nuclear fusion. The framework is useful for thinking about invention and innovation. The chapters are relatively basic overviews of the nine innovation types. The book is accessible and readable, which helps to reach a broad audience. Book ends with some reality checks on innovations, in particular with regard to energy and climate change. A few notes:

"I will adopt a more general approach to inventive failures by focusing on the fact that the flow of fundamental and enormously successful inventions that have created modern civilization during the past 150 years has been accompanied by a frustrating lack of progress in many key areas, as well as on the innovations that, to put it charitably, did not do as well as initially expected. In this book I examine three notable categories of these innovation failures: unfulfilled promises, disappointments, and eventual rejections." (p. 11-12)

"The history of tetraethyl lead is, in the first place, the story of failed public health measures: if the known risks had been taken into account, there would not have been, decades later, a failed invention and the need to ban the compound's use. CFCs and DDT carry different, much more sobering but also expected lessons: human interventions in Earth's envi- ronment often carry delayed, complex risks, so far removed from the initial concern and so far beyond the readily conceivable complications that only time and the accumulation of events will make us aware of those unexpected but highly consequential impacts." (p. 23)

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 book has not picked up much traction. A few notes:

"For the critique of political economy, economic nature is not the essence of economics. The essence of economics is society, and society is the social individual in her social relations. The circumstance that Man in her social relations appears as a personification of economic things – a bearer of economic laws – focuses the critique of political economy as a negative theory of society. In capitalism, Marx argues, the individuals are governed by the product of their own hands and what appears thus as economic nature is in fact a socially constituted nature that belongs to definite social relations. Social reality is thus an 'objective appearance': the social individual vanishes in her own social world only to reappear with a price tag, by which she is governed.35 Yet this inversion of the social subject into the economic object is her own work. It does not derive from some abstract economic matter that objectifies itself in the acting subject, as if by force of nature. For the critique of political economy the critical issue is thus not the discovery of general economic laws of history. Rather, its object of critique is the existent society, in which definite social relations subsist in the form of abstract economic forces, things endowed with an invisible will that 'asserts itself as a regulative law of nature'." (p. 27)

"Every so-called trickle-down effect that capitalist accumulation might bring forth presupposes a prior and sustained trickle up in the capitalist accumulation of wealth. And then society 'suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence'." (p. 225)

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 at the outset of the book due to gendered spaces he was only able to collect poems from male poets). I found this book when doing some work on Amharic proverbs. This is a unique book, but one with quite a specialist audience. 

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 intentional about choices and clearly written. Really well done. For anyone looking for evidence on post-conflict statebuilding, this is excellent, and for doctoral students this is an exemplary guide to follow. A couple of notes:

"This book explores how war time processes affect post-war state building efforts by examining the governing strategies of rebel groups that win control of the state. Post-war governance is a continuation of war: though violence has ceased, the victor must consolidate its control over the state through a process of internal conquest. This means carefully making choices about resource allocation toward development and security." (p. v)

"One solution to the problem of strong top- down control from an illiberal rebel regime may be to implement local community programs to build a strong civil society. However, it is not enough to simply prescribe international engagement in local communities. An important aspect of my argument is that my attention must be paid to where these efforts are targeted, depending on the policy's goals. I demonstrate in this book that the international community must contend with the double-edged sword of grassroots citizen political action. Ultimately, if grievances risk fanning the flames of renewed conflict after war has officially ended, then post-war efforts should focus on ensuring peaceful political participation from a vibrant civil society rather than violent participation from a resentful one. Thus international post-war reconstruction efforts should include civil society development to promote democracy and peace." (p. 263) 

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, meaning how it has been employed historically, through cultural expressions and so forth. Landmark contributions, as these are, often appear less groundbreaking when read decades later, which is more a product of the mode of critique becoming much more integrated into our thinking than it does the uniqueness of the day. A few notes:

"As I read some critics of my books, my first reaction was to remain silent. To use a metaphor, why should I be forced to play chess with people who do not seem to know the rules of the game? In effect, beyond positivism, I have been trying to understand the powerful yet invisible epistemological order that seems to make possible, at a given period, a given type of discourse about Africa - or, for that matter, about any social group in Africa, Asia, or Europe." (p. xiv)

"A comprehensive study of the "terra nullius" politics by Keller, Lisitzyn, and Mann (1938) indicates that between 1400 and 1800 not one non-European nations was considered to have the right "to possess or to transfer any dominion in the international law sense."" (p. 33)

"The sequence of analyses in this book has focused on two main significant issues: first, the Greco-Roman thematization of otherness and its articulation in such concepts as 'barbarism' and 'savagery'; second, the complex process that has organized in Europe the idea of Africa. It is, in any case, troubling to note that since the fifteenth century the will to truth in Europe seems to espouse perfectly a will to power." (p. 212)

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 How Innovation Works. In this case, the focus is inclusive innovation that benefits a broader number of people in society, as opposed to innovation that benefits a few (and potentially harms the majority). Like Ridley's book, it is a mass market book that tells stories of innovation. Also like Ridley's book, the book is general selects positive cases from the West and negative cases from the rest and ends up with quite normative or ideological takeaways, as opposed to findings rooted in the evidence from the book / drawn out from the examples on innovation that are surveyed (that coming from a reader who has not won a Nobel!). The key solutions proposed by the authors include: increase people power via unions, increase civil society action and organizing, create incentives for social good, break up big tech, reform taxes to align labor and capital, invest in people / workers, enhance data protection, and the need for government leadership. A few notes:

"There is reason to be hopeful because history also teaches us that a more inclusive vision that listens to a broader set of voices and recognizes the effects on every one is possible. Shared prosperity is more likely when countervailing powers hold entrepreneurs and technology leaders accountable-and push production methods and innovation in a more worker-friendly direction. Inclusive visions do not avoid some of the thorniest questions, such as whether the benefits that some reap justify the costs that others suffer. But they ensure that social decisions recognize their full consequences and without silencing those who do not gain." (p. 29)

"By the mid-nineteenth century; tens of thousands of middle-status Britons had formed the idea that they could rise substantially above their station through entrepreneurship and command of technologies. Other parts of Western Europe saw a similar process of social hierarchies loosening and ambitious men (and rarely women in those patriarchal times) wishing to gain wealth or status. But nowhere else in the world at that time do we see so many middle-class people trying to pierce through the existing social hierarchy. It was these meddling sort of men who were critical for the innovations and the introduction of new technologies throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain." (p. 166)