The Machine that Depoliticizes

In 1990, James Ferguson wrote a book called The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development”, Depoliticisation and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. This book contained an anthropological analysis of the disproportionately large donordriven development machinery in this small landlocked country in southern Africa. Its implications had profound resonances for the critical treatment of development far beyond Lesotho, in all of Africa and certainly most of the developing world. The reason for this prima facie appears to be a simple one, and indeed Ferguson offers it to us. No one before Ferguson or at the very least few as clearly and cogently, had turned their critical attentions to analysing the actual apparatus that drove development. While scholarly analyses and critiques galore had thrashed out the political, social and economic potential of development, there was a surprising gap in understanding about the development industry itself. The existing literature in the field was dominated by the ideas of ‘insiders’ or ‘sympathetic outsiders’ who believed in development planning and therefore scrutinized it with a fix-it attitude, or at the other extreme, by radical Marxist and dependency theorists for whom the entire development effort was a great capitalist sham. There was little insight into how the bureaucrats, experts, consultants and planners that populated development organizations and establishments actually operated and the effects their operations created beyond their own proclamations.