Book Review on James Fergusons Anti-Politics Machine...

The gap between developed and underdeveloped is evident in today’s world. In naà ¯ve effort to bridge this gap a host of aid projects and development schemes are plotted onto less developed countries. But what is development really? James Ferguson attempts to explore this concept in his book â€Å"The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho†. The book is an extension of Ferguson’s PhD dissertation and was published in 1990 by Cambridge University Press. The book is interesting in that it seeks to give the reader a critical understanding and insight of the actual processes that take place when development projects are implemented. Using the small African country of Lesotho as his setting, Ferguson’s†¦show more content†¦The developers’ lack of understanding also contributes to the implementation of development projects in a manner that is culturally insensitive resulting in tensi on. The planners of the Thaba-Tseka Development Project generalised the culture of the Lesotho people with that of other African cultures and concluded that they are a peasant farming society. This is far from the truth however. The fourth part of the book (Chapters 6 – 8) describes the various aspects of the Thaba-Tseka Project – what was done, how the projects failed and why they failed. Ferguson pays particular attention to the livestock development scheme, the crop development scheme, the woodlot project as well as the plan for a decentralisation process, all of which were failures. In this part of the book one can explicitly see the tension between the development practitioners of the Thaba-Tseka project and the local people of the Thaba-Tseka region. Unfortunately one of the main failings of the Thaba-Tseka project was the inability to address these tensions. Ferguson’s final chapter culminates the previous chapter as he discusses his theory of the anti-po litics machine. In this last chapter he highlights the dependency relationship, through aid and development schemes, between less developed countries and developed countries and also hoe â€Å"development† is used as a tool for the expansion of Western bureaucracy. The argument