Government of Development: Peasants and Politicians in Postcolonial Tanzania

What drives state officials to force development projects on resisting beneficiary populations? In his new analysis of the Tanzanian state’s 1960s and 1970s campaign to settle the country’s rural population in socialist villages, Leander Schneider traces the discourses and practices that authorized state officials to direct the lives of peasants-by coercive means if necessary. Government of Development shows that the practices constituting this project’s mode of government far exceeded political elites’ pursuit of their own narrow interests, the go-to explanation for many accounts of similar instances of authoritarian rule and developmental failures in Africa and beyond.