100 Books Like Encountering Development

I’ve always known that IR theory is terrible at helping us predict anything. This book confirmed that instinct—and then gave me something better.

The book doesn't offer a grand theory of the world; it shows how careful, humble, context-driven thinking beats big ideas almost every time. I loved how it dismantled the myth of expert authority with one brutal line: "Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world…are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys."

It taught me to think in probabilities, to temper my overconfidence, and to focus on the details, not broad generality. In many ways, this has made me a worse “IR scholar”, but demonstrably much better at predicting events. This book is indispensable if you care about understanding policy outcomes, rather than just sounding clever. It sharpened the way I think about the future.

The Will to Improve is most celebrated for its explanation of ‘rendering technical’: the ways complex, political factors contributing to poverty are reduced to those amenable to technical intervention.

But I have found Tania Li’s concept of ‘trustee’ the most useful in my work on local development actors: understanding how they come to take on the role of trustee, their desire to ‘improve’ others, and the prickly subjects that resist their efforts.

Li traces the ‘will to improve’ through 200 years of Indonesian history, but it is most powerfully elucidated through her rich ethnographic description from the province of Sulawesi.

Her analysis weaves together Marx, Foucault, and Gramsci, showing how theory can illuminate description. It is a masterclass in storytelling and the power of theory. 

Akhil Gupta asks why so many people in India suffer extreme poverty, and yet invite so little reaction.

His answer is structural violence. State inaction, or ineffective action, are part of the conditions that let people die from poverty.

The brilliance in Akhil Gupta’s work is inviting us to look at the state not as a coherent and unified entity, but as operating through multiple levels, agencies, and departments.

As someone interested in local development actors, I find his ethnographic accounts of low-level government offices and officials particularly compelling.

By showing everyday practices in these offices, and fine-grained encounters between officials and welfare recipients, Gupta shows how state indifference is produced, and challenged, in ways that shape life and death. 

I have been fascinated with selfhood, the cultivation of ‘subjects of development’ as either targets, or ‘trustees’ of aid, since my PhD.

Anand Pandian’s Crooked Stalks offers a nuanced, careful, and ultimately beautiful account of how moral selves are cultivated among the Kallar caste near Madurai in Tamil Nadu, India.

Development looms large among the Kallar, what Pandian describes as a ‘moral horizon’ that is an impetus to transform people’s lives and the material environment.

In presenting an impressive breadth of historical material alongside ethnographic description he shows the remnants of colonial rule in contemporary virtues, contributing to understanding the ‘postcolonial self’. 

Holly High addresses a question that puzzles students of development studies: why do people engage in development programs when they have such a poor record of success?

It is not due to a lack of cynicism or suspicion. Rather High shows that rural Laos residents continue to hold both unconscious and social desires for development, producing a “shared delirium” that contains its own rationalities.

Notably, Fields of Desire brings Lacanian and Deleuzian theories to the anthropology of development: a welcome respite from Foucault.

It is also an evocative ethnographic account of the experience of poverty, and poverty reduction programs in a Lao village. 

I loved this book because it finally explained something I’d felt for years but couldn’t quite articulate: that International Relations theory, as I was taught it, never really made sense of the world I knew. I remember reading it and thinking—yes, this is why so much of what passes for "global" thinking felt alien to my own experience of politics, power, and history. I’d always recognised that IR was speaking a language of empire without realising it.

What I value most is how the authors expose the discipline’s deep entanglement with Western historical assumptions—something I’d long mistrusted as universally applicable—but have never seen mapped so clearly. It helped me understand not just what IR is but also what it gets wrong about the world.

This book blew open a question I’d been circling for years: how do we know what’s real in the social world, and who decides?

I first read the philosopher John Searle (who the book starts with) as a student, and it lit a fire, but this book turned that spark into something much more powerful. It showed me that reality isn't just "out there," waiting to be described—it's built through language, norms, and belief, and yet that doesn't make it any less real.

I loved how this book made space for complexity without sliding into postmodern fog. It gave me sharper tools to think with and helped me see how our shared world gets made—and how it could be made differently. I've never thought the same way since. The book outlines what we get philosophically wrong about the world in a way that is useful.

This book made me stop and think—not about theory but institutional machinery. It captures the strange truth that international organisations often fail not because they don't care but because they are built in ways that make failure inevitable.

I've spent years trying to understand why international interventions so often feel disconnected from the realities they're meant to address. This book didn't just confirm that suspicion—it opened up the system and showed me why they get things wrong. The book is about more than country offices; it is really about systems and their blind spots.

My copy still has whole paragraphs underlined, and every time I have read it, it gives me something new. It gave me a different vocabulary for thinking about dysfunction—not as an accident but as a product of design.

Roxborough’s work helped me to understand better the structure and development of peripheral and semiperipheral societies.

It was particularly useful to me as a part of my work has to do with the study Latin American and Balkan Societies. I personally recommend the book very strongly. It was an excellent guide for those interested in the sociology of development and underdevelopment.

Stefan Dercon argues that the answer lies not in specific policies but rather in a key ‘development bargain,’ whereby a country’s leaders shift from protecting their own interests to gambling on a growth-based future. Despite its imperfections, China is among the most striking recent success stories, along with Indonesia and Ethiopia.

This book is about these choices, in contrast to countries stuck in a bad equilibrium. I loved the global experience Dercon drew on, ranging from Ebola in Sierra Leone, scandals in Malawi, beer factories in the Congo, mobile phone licenses in Mozambique, and humanitarian aid in Sudan.