Alice Wiemers, "Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana" (Ohio UP, 2021)

Alice Wiemers' 'Village Work' examines development by focusing outward from Kpasenpke (Pasenpe), a village in northern Ghana, to show how everyday labor, local officials, and family networks produced a persistent practice of rural statecraft. The book traces this history from the interwar colonial period through the 1990s, arguing that the concept of the village became a central, though often interchangeable, unit of development policy. Wiemers foregrounds the labor—both coerced and voluntary—that built schools, clinics, roads, and other infrastructures, and she follows influential local actors and families who brokered state projects. By situating the hinterland at the center of analysis, the study reframes Ghanaian twentieth-century history around small projects and local negotiations rather than only large national schemes. The book connects intellectual debates about development, neoliberal retrenchment, and the continuities of 'village work' as a form of governing peripheral spaces.