The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics

Demonstrating that the “will to improve” has a long and troubled history, Li identifies enduring continuities from the colonial period to the present. She explores the tools experts have used to set the conditions for reform—tools that combine the reshaping of desires with applications of force. Attending in detail to the highlands of Sulawesi, she shows how a series of interventions entangled with one another and tracks their results, ranging from wealth to famine, from compliance to political mobilization, and from new solidarities to oppositional identities and violent attack. The Will to Improve is an engaging read—conceptually innovative, empirically rich, and alive with the actions and reflections of the targets of improvement, people with their own critical analyses of the problems that beset them.

• Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity
• Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950
• The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho
• Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
• Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History)
• Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the Collège de France)
• "Society Must Be Defended" (Lectures at the Collège de France)
• The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
• Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime
• The Wretched of the Earth