Opening the stacks
Opening the stacks
The inherent dysfunctional behaviors within bureaucracies, such as prioritizing quantitative metrics over substantive outcomes, as seen in the ujamaa campaign.
2 chapters across 1 book
The chapter examines the forced villagization campaigns in Tanzania and Ethiopia as emblematic cases of high-modernist social engineering driven by bureaucratic and authoritarian interests. Both campaigns prioritized quantitative metrics and centralized planning over local knowledge, resulting in coercive resettlements that disrupted agricultural productivity, social cohesion, and ultimately led to widespread failure and resistance. The analysis highlights the hubris of state planners who sought to impose rationalized, standardized villages to enhance political control and socialist modernization, but instead produced notional villages that served bureaucratic and surveillance purposes.
Chapter 6 examines the Soviet Union's high modernist project of collectivization, detailing the ideological ambitions and brutal realities of transforming agriculture through state-driven industrialization and social engineering. It highlights the socio-economic restructuring of villages, the coercive enforcement of collectivization policies, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and the cultural as well as ecological consequences of these large-scale reforms. The chapter situates Soviet collectivization within broader historical and ideological contexts, emphasizing both the utopian aspirations and the severe human costs involved.