From his doctoral work, Yahia Baiza wrote "Education in Afghanistan: Development, Influences and Legacies since 1901" (2013), published by Routledge. The book covers more than a century (1901-2012), structured around the political eras of the period. As much as this book is about education, it is equally about the context of each time period. This partly to help us as readers have context and probably also partly due to the scarcity of available research specific to education during the period of study. In that sense, a parts readers are left wanting more about the actual education systems. This is a niche book of which there are few comparable options, so for anyone interested in this specific area of study this is worth picking up. A few quotes:

"There has often been a misconception about the nature of modern as well as madrasa education in Afghanistan. Since the latter is understood to be an exclusively or predominantly religious-oriented form of education, it has been often described as 'Islamic school' or 'religious school', although madrasas do also teach non-religious subjects. By contrast, as modern education has been adopted from the European model of education and many of its subjects are different from the traditional madrasa education, modern education has too often been mistakenly described as 'secular' education. As shall be discussed in this book, the modern education system not only includes both religious and non-religious subjects, but religious subjects for a very long time occupied an important position. In addition, the so-called 'secular' education had to rely on teachers from the madrasa system, who would teach language, literature, religion, Arabic language and grammar, mathematical sciences, etc. Furthermore, the modern education system has been borrowing terms and concepts from the traditional madrasa system. For instance, terms such as maktab (an elementary level of education), talib (seeker) or talibul Ilm (the seeker of knowledge) for student, mudaris (teacher), talim (education) and tarbiyah (upbringing for education) etc are rooted in the so-called 'Islamic' education system. Equally, the madrasa, maktab, and makatib-e asri for a long time were used interchangeably, and meant 'modern school'." (p. 44-45)

"The curriculum, which was an important characteristic of the 'modernness' of the schools, was a combination of aspects of religious education and aspects of western education. In civil schools, the curriculum for primary level education consisted of religious education (reading and reciting the Quran), Persian, mathematics, geography, and calligraphy. The lower secondary level curriculum included religious education, history, geography, painting, health care, Persian, Afghani or Pashto, and foreign languages, specifically English, Urdu, or Turkish. The curriculum at the upper secondary level consisted of subjects such as religious education (recitation of the Quran, Tradition (hadiths), Arabic language and grammar, Persian, history, geography, algebra, geometry, analytical geometry, natural sciences, alchemy, and English." (p. 51-52)

"Education became a key catalyst as well as victim on both sides of the war. The PDPA, under the Soviet Union's advisers, integrated socialist ideology in school textbooks, and teacher education programmes. Similarly, the resistance parties, under the United States' and other Western educational experts, used schools in refugee camps and in the areas outside the state's control in Afghanistan as recruitment and propaganda centres for the Islamist parties. They developed their textbooks for disseminating anti-Soviet and anti-PDPA messages of violence, aggression, killing, and use of firearms, etc. As a result, this period experienced two key parallel education streams: the state's education system under the control of the PDPA, and the refugees' education, under the control of resistance parties." (p. 131)

"When the University of Nebraska programme staff developed these textbooks, international organizations chose to ignore the images of Islamic militancy in them for the first five years of the programme (Davis 2002: 93). Later on, when the United Nations and various NGOs lobbied against such teaching and learning materials, some images and messages that promoted violence and killing were removed from the text- books, but the religious content remained unchanged (Pourzand 2004: 24–25). However, it is also worth noting that none of the NGOs or the UN agencies criticized these textbooks as long as the Soviet Union's army was present in Afghanistan." (p. 155) 

Ha-Joon Chang is an exceptional academic - unique contributions, excellent storyteller, interdisciplinary approaches, and in this book appetizing: "Edible Economics: The World in 17 Dishes" (2022). This book was not written for academics, but everyday readers who might get pulled into economics, history and politics via food. This book is an easy and enjoyable read (~160 pages), and he continues his typical myth-busting style throughout. Reflecting on my notes, seems I was more interested in Chang's "greens" than the "ice cream" (see first quote below):

"With this book, I'm trying to make economics more palatable by serving it with stories about food. But be warned. The food stories are mostly not about the economics of food - how it is grown, processed, branded, sold, bought and consumed. These aspects are not usually central to the economic stories I have for you. And there are lots of interesting books about them around. My food stories are a bit like the ice cream that some of your moms may have offered to bribe you to eat your greens - except that in this book ice cream comes first, the greens later…" (p. xxv)

"It is a complete myth that people in poor countries, many of which are in the tropics, lack in terms of work ethic. In fact, they work much harder than their counterparts in rich countries. To begin with, usually a much higher proportion of the working age population is working in poor countries than in rich ones. According to data from the World Bank, in 2019, the labor force participation was 83% in Tanzania, 77% in Vietnam and 67% in Jamaica, compared to 60% in Germany, 61% in the US and 63% in South Korea, the supposed nation of workaholics." (p. 24)

"There was much criticism of these policies, not just outside but also inside Japan. Critics pointed out that Japan would be better off if it just imported things like steel and automobiles and concentrated on making things like silk and other textile products, which it was good at. If you protect your inefficient producers of, say, passenger cars (like Toyota and Nissan) by imposing tariffs on foreign cars, consumers either have to pay more than the world market price to get better cars from abroad or drive inferior and uglier Japanese cars, they pointed out. Also, by artificially channeling bank loans into inefficient industries, like automobile production, through government directives, they added, you are taking away funds from efficient industries, like silk, that could be using the same amount of capital to produce far more output. This is an absolutely correct argument - if you take a country's capabilities as a producer as given. However, in the long run, a country can change its productive capabilities and become better at things at which it is not good at today." (p. 43)

"Countries have required MNCs to transfer technology to their subsidiaries or put ceilings on the royalty they can charge for licensing their technologies to the subsidiaries. They have sometimes mandated MNCs to hire more than a certain proportion of the locals in the workforce, or to train workers they hire. To maximize the indirect benefits of MNC investments, they have required the MNC subsidiaries to buy more than a certain proportion of their inputs from local suppliers - this is known as the 'local contents requirement'. These policies were used extensively - and successfully - by countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Finland between the end of the Second World War and the 1980s." (p. 84)

"… the best economists should be, like the best of the cooks, able to combine different theories to have a more balanced view. They understand both the power and the limitations of the market, while knowing that entrepreneurs are the most successful when supported and suitably regulated by the state. They should be willing to combine individualist theories and socialist (or, more broadly, collectivist) theories - and augment them with theories of human capabilities - in order to come up with a more rounded view on issues like inequality, care work and the welfare state." (p. 161-162) 

Edited collections are challenging to write about and review, with the chapters covering diverse areas / topics and each offering unique data and perspectives. One unique edited collection on Qatar is Policy-Making in a Transformative State: The Case of Qatar, edited by M. E. Tok, L. R. M. Alkhater and L. Pal (2016). The book is over 400 pages and has 14 chapters, beyond the scope of a quick summary. However, there are some valuable contributions that I will point readers toward, which will be of interest from the perspective of understanding policy making as well as unique contributions to understand the Qatari context.

One of the gems in this book is Khalid Rashid Alkhater's Macroeconomic Stabilization Policies and Sustainable Growth in Qatar (Ch 12). While the title is generic, this is an excellent contribution on financial and monetary policy, which I will continue to use in my teaching. The chapter by Lolwah Alkhater on educational reform (Ch 4) provides much more detail than Vora's book. For anyone interested in the education system (and its transformations), this is a critical reflection of decisions made and an important resource. This is followed by a chapter on higher education (Ch 5, by Ahmed Baghdady), which is more descriptive.

In the available English literature, there are few places where one can find nuance on constitutional and legal details of Qatar (while there are political books, like Kamara, these remain quite broad on these points). For this, Hassan Al-Sayed's chapter on Qatar's Constitutional and Legal System (Ch 2) is worth reading. Now the dean of CHSS at HBKU, Amal Mohammed Al-Malki, has a chapter on identity (Ch 9) and Hend Al Muftah has a chapter on labour (migration, Qatarization; Ch 10) with explicit policy recommendations.

Many of the books available on Qatar are written by outsider voices, sometimes following short stays in the country and often by scholars who do not have access to Arabic sources or conversations. This edited volume provides a broader range of content, not only with insider perspectives but also in many instances contributing original data and interviews. Although much has changed since 2016, this is still a useful book for those interested in understanding Qatar, and particularly useful understanding policy challenges and policy making. One downside to the book is the cost - this is an expensive academic book published by Palgrave, which reduces the accessibility of this collection for those without institutional subscriptions.

In 2019, Joseph Stiglitz published "People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent." The book covers a wide range of topics, largely on contemporary American policy while also highlighting their histories - and is overtly political (Trump comes up frequently, throughout). The author provides an analysis of the challenges as well as potential pathways for the future. Some of the policies that are recommended include new regulations, such as regulating corporate business and money in politics. Other recommendations include introducing new services in the areas of social protection and safety nets as well as ensuring full employment, equality of opportunity and greater investment in education and research. Many of the recommendations will be common to readers familiar with economic arguments on the left-of-centre political spectrum. Very few, with the exception potentially of a universal basic income scheme, are radical or new. Nonetheless, this is worth a read, or at least the scan, to understand the economic arguments behind these recommendations. 

Some context on why regulations are called for and the barriers to change:

"Adam Smith's invisible hand (the notion that the pursuit of self-interest leads as if by an invisible hand to the well-being of society) is perhaps the single most important idea in modern economics, and yet even Smith recognized be limited power of markets and the need for government action. Modern economic research - both theory and experience -has enhanced our understanding of government's fundamental role in a market economy. It is needed both to do what markets won't and can't do as well as make sure that markets act as they are supposed to." (p. 24)

"The truly greedy and short-sighted in the 1 percent have come to understand that globalization, financialization, and other elements of the current economic rulebook are not supported by the vast majority of Americans, and understandably so. For these, this has one deeply disturbing implication: if we let democracy run its course, and if we believe in a modicum of rationality on the part of voters, they will choose an alternative course. In their pursuit of their naked self-interest, these super-rich have thus formulated a three-part strategy: deception, disenfranchisement, and disempowerment. Deception: they tell others that policies like the 2017 tax bill to further and enrich the rich will actually help ordinary Americans, or that a trade war with China will somehow reverse deindustrialization. Disenfranchisement: they work hard to make sure that those who might vote for more progressive policies can't or don't, either by making it hard for them to register, or by making it difficult for them to vote. And finally, disempowerment: they put sufficient constraints on government so that, if all else fails and a more progressive government were elected, it couldn't do what is needed to reform our politics and economy. One example: the constraints imposed by an increasingly stacked and ideological Supreme Court." (p. 27)

"A particularly invidious example of market power is the oligopoly in academic publishing. Chapter 1 highlighted the central role of knowledge in increases in our well-being. Advances in knowledge, in turn, require the dissemination of ideas. But in our market-based economy, this has been entrusted largely to the market, and the form that has taken is a highly concentrated and highly profitable oligopoly, with some five publishers accounting for more than half of all papers published, and for 70 percent of those in the social sciences. The irony is that the publishers get the articles for free (in some cases, they even get paid to publish them), the research reported is typically funded by the government, the publishers get academics to do most of the editorial work (the review of the articles) for free, and educational institutions and libraries (largely government-funded) then pay the publishers. Their high prices and excess profits, of course, mean that there is less money to fund research." (p. 76)

"Right now, on balance, our economy needs more regulations, at least in certain key arenas. Our economy has been changing fast, and our regulations need to keep pace. Twenty years ago, for instance, we didn't realize the dangers posed by carbon emissions; we now do, and we need regulations to reflect that. Twenty years ago, obesity was not the problem it is today. Now, we need to protect our children from the sweet and salty foods, designed to be addictive, that are contributing to this epidemic. Twenty years ago we didn't have the opioid crisis that has in part been manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry. Twenty years ago we didn't have a rash of for-profit educational institutions exploiting their students and the government loans for which they qualify. The conflict over net neutrality provides a vivid example of the need for regulation and the ways in which corporate interest manipulate the system for their own advantage." (p. 146)