Development Studies Program - Watson Institute for International Studies

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A Development Studies Reading List

What books do students of development read? A small and somewhat arbitrary list, to be updated.

Amartya Sen. Development as Freedom . 1999.
An argument for focusing on improving human capabilities (rather than just growth) in promoting development by the Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher.

Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyn Huber and John Stephens. Capitalist Development and Democracy . 1992.
The definitive study of the social and historical roots of democracy, with case studies of Europe , Latin America and the Carribean. It's the working class, stupid!

John Harriss. Depoliticizing Development . 2002.
How the World Bank appropriated and made a mess of an important social science concept - social capital.

Peter Evans. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation . 1999.
Why and how states matter for economic development, with case studies of Brazil , India and South Korea .

Arturo Escobar. Encountering Development: the making and unmaking of the Third World . 1995.
The seminal post-colonial critique of development as discourse and power.

James Ferguson. The Anti-politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho . 1994.
Foucault goes to Lesotho . A brilliant case study of a development project gone amuck, and why cattle aren't just cattle.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil . 1992.
Poverty is violence: a powerful and searing ethnography of gender, class and why babies die in the Northeast of Brazil.

James Scott. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance . 1985.
The ravages of capitalism as seen from below, and how peasants fight back and lose. In Malaysia .

James Scott. Seeing Like a State: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed . 1998.
The subtitle says it all. Beware the technocrats and weak civil societies.

Mahmood Mamdani. Citizen and Subject: decentralized despotism and the legacy of late colonialism . 1997.
Award winning exploration of the colonial roots of the democratic problem in sub-Saharan Africa .

Barrington Moore . Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: lord and peasant in the making of the modern world. 1967.
The classic study of the social origins of democracy. It's the peasantry, stupid!

Joel Migdal. Strong Societies and Weak States : state-society relations and state capabilities in the Third World . 1988.
Why is it so difficult to make the state work in much of the developing world? Paradigmatic.

Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation. 1944. What happens when markets are not restrained by social institutions?
The most important book of our times?

Atul Kohli. The state and poverty in India : the politics of reform . 1987.
How and why parties matter for poverty reduction.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso and F. Enzo. Development and Dependency in Latin America . 1979.
An enduring classic that triggered a paradigm shift, by the sociologist-turned-president of Brazil .

Albert Hirschman. Getting ahead collectively: grassroots experiences in Latin America . 1984.
A classic by the master of disciplinary trespassing.

Joseph Stiglitz. Globalization and its Discontents . 2002.
How the IMF got it all wrong from someone who would know.

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