James Ferguson

In *The Anti-Politics Machine* (1990), based on research on the Thaba-Tseka development project in Lesotho, Ferguson argued that international development organizations systematically depoliticized structural inequality by reframing political problems as technical ones. He showed how development agencies' institutional needs shaped their portrayal of Lesotho as a traditional peasant society, obscuring its actual dependence on the South African migrant labor economy.

In *Global Shadows* (2006), Ferguson examined how globalization produces not uniform integration but stark patterns of inclusion and exclusion, particularly in Africa. He used the metaphor of "shadows" to describe zones of social life that fall outside the reach of formal economic and political structures, such as the growing prevalence of precarious informal livelihoods.

Ferguson conducted his primary fieldwork in Lesotho for *The Anti-Politics Machine* and later expanded his geographic focus to Zambia and southern Africa more broadly. His later work addressed urbanization, resource extraction, and the politics of economic decline across the region.

In *Give a Man a Fish* (2015), Ferguson explored how the retreat of formal wage employment in southern Africa has created conditions for new forms of social distribution, such as cash transfers and welfare payments. He argued that these developments may point toward new forms of political mobilization not based on the traditional wage-labor model.