Tania Murray Li

Tania Murray Li, born in 1959 and professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, is one of the most influential authors on land, development and dispossession. Three decades of fieldwork in the highlands of Sulawesi, Indonesia, have allowed her to follow closely what theories of development and capitalism describe from afar: how a community that farmed communal land becomes a society of owners, debtors and landless labourers.

The Will to Improve (2007) is her most cited book. It analyses two centuries of programmes to improve the population of Indonesia, from the Dutch colonial regime to the World Bank, and shows that they all share a gesture she calls rendering technical: turning problems of power and distribution into problems of management that experts can solve without touching politics. Her reading of Foucault and governmentality has since been applied to the city, to informal settlements and to urban upgrading programmes.

Land's End (2014) describes how cocoa and the market transformed an Indigenous frontier into capitalist relations without anyone planning it, producing what she calls surplus populations: landless people whom capital does not need as labour either. Plantation Life (2021), with Pujo Semedi, studies oil palm plantations as a form of corporate occupation of territory. Her concepts feed the urban debate on dispossession, informality and displacement.