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David Sogge

David Sogge
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dsogge [at] antenna.nl

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David Sogge

Independent Consultant

Transnational Institute Board member, David works as an independent advisor for grant-making agencies, specialising in civil society. Research and other professional activities in Africa provided a basis for books and articles on Angola and Mozambique and many unpublished reports on South Africa. More recently, evaluative research assignments have taken him to Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union. Trained at Harvard, David earned his graduate degrees from Princeton and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague.

Foreign Aid Ideologies and Impacts; Member-based Organisations, including Movements of Urban Poor in Africa and Trade Unions; Policy Activism via Networks and Academic Units; Southern Africa

English, Portuguese

Selected publications: 
Give and Take
Compassion and Calculation

Recent content by David Sogge

Supranational governance: a challenge to building resilient states and peace (22 Sep 2011)

In troubled areas, the vital work of building peace and resilient states continues to be undone by weak and distorted governance at the supranational level. 

We want our money back (14 Jul 2011)

Angry citizens want their nations’ money back and rightfully so. Banks should be curbed instead of allowed to enthusiastically facilitate the illicit outflow of money by dictators.

Millennium Development Goals for the Rich? (20 Sep 2010)

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are today’s global foreign aid agenda. Yet if we look at who's aiding whom, the world's pro-rich global agenda is rather more obvious.

Angola: Reinventing Pasts and Futures (7 Jun 2010)

Today’s political economy in Angola resembles the colonial order of yesterday: a narrow state-based elite manages the economy to promote a development model that redistributes wealth upward and outward.

Moving targets: notes on social movements (23 Mar 2010)

Social movements cannot be built or engineered, but outside actors - such as aid agencies seeking to support transformative change - can play a constructive role in enabling an environment in which movements can flourish and expand their outreach.

Repairing the weakest links: a new agenda for fragile states (27 Oct 2009)

In order for fragile states and the concept of state weakness to be properly understood, they need to be considered in the contexts of political economy and world history. Four apparently disparate cases – Guatemala, Haiti, Kosovo and Angola – show surprising similarities, and highlight common lessons for international state-building efforts.

Angola, "Failed" yet "Successful" (7 May 2009)
Angola has topped the list of 'failed states' for decades, but its government has recently managed to put an end to 40 years of violent conflict and its economy is growing as the situation stabilises. European and other international decision-makers might look afresh at notions of state weakness in general, and their relevance to the case of Angola in particular, argues David Sogge.

Portuguese

Inequality: Can the foreign aid industry help roll it back? (24 Mar 2009)

When news arrives from faraway places of disaster, hunger and economic setbacks, our political figures and media usually start talking about how to mount a rescue with foreign aid. It’s the cowboy in the white hat. After all, some of the world’s most powerful institutions, notably the IMF and World Bank, lead the aid industry. It has a global budget of over 70 billion Euros a year and employs a global workforce of more than half a million. Its people rub elbows with diplomats, military commanders and influential pundits.

“Talk of human security helps frame power relations” (1 Feb 2009)

Talk of "human security" asserts a prerogative of the powerful to say whose rights are to be respected, whose not respected, and to say who shall be system of domination now in place -– a risky thing, given that “stabilisation” practices have a way of triggering a lot of instability.

State weakness: seen from another perspective (26 Sep 2008)
Talk of “failing states” represents a dominant view that states exist chiefly to promote globalisation’s winners and to police its losers. States should instead seek to ensure better life-chances for all citizens.

Under a variety of terms - weak states, fragile states, states in crisis, countries at risk of instability and low-income countries under pressure - the idea of state failure has become the subject of much attention.

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