The Anti-Politics Machine

The Anti-Politics Machine is a book by James Ferguson. This book is a critique of the concept of "development" in general, viewed through the lens of failed attempts, specifically the Thaba-Tseka Development Project in Lesotho from 1975–1984. He writes about the countless "development agencies" that have their hand in the so-called "Third World" but points out the consistent failure of these agencies to bring about any sort of economic stability. This is what Ferguson calls the "development discourse fantasy", which arises from backward logic.

At a critical juncture in the early nineteenth century the state began to connect itself to a series of groups “that in different ways had long tried to shape and administer the lives of individuals in pursuit of various goals” rather than simply extend the absolutist state's repressive machinery of social control.Michel Foucault's work on the prison, the clinic, and the asylum – on the development of "bio-power" – analyzed the plurality of governing agencies and authorities who developed programs, strategies, and technologies that were deployed to optimize the health, welfare and life of populations. He referred to this process with the neologism "governmentality" (governmental rationality). One of the last of these new applied sciences was the "development apparatus", the post-world war extension of colonial rule after the independence of third world states.

Ferguson utilized the governmentality framework in The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (1990), the first in many similar explorations. Ferguson sought to explore how the "development discourse" works, that is, how the language and practices used by development specialists influence the ways in which development is delivered, and the unintended consequences it fosters. He found that development projects which failed on their own terms could be redefined as "successes" on which new projects were to be modelled. The net effect of development, he argues, has been to "de-politicize" questions of resource allocation and to strengthen bureaucratic power. In his analysis of a development project in Lesotho between 1978 and 1982, he examined the following discursive maneuvers.

We must ask: "why statements are acceptable in 'development' discourse that would be considered absurd in academic settings, but also why many acceptable statements from the realm of academic discourse - or even from that of common observation - fail to find their way into the discursive regime of 'development'"

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