This book describes and explains the extraordinary wave of popular
protest that swept across the so-called Third World and the
countries of the former socialist bloc during the period from the
late 1970s to the early 1990s, in response to the mounting debt
crisis and the austerity measures widely adopted as part of
economic "reform" and "adjustment."
During the development decades of the 1960s and 1970s,
governments around the world borrowed heavily to finance economic
and social development, only to succumb to the global debt crisis
and general recession of the 1980s. The last 15-20 years have
witnessed the increasing adoption of neo-liberal austerity
measures, led by the stabilization and structural adjustment
programs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank,
which have averted a crisis for international banks by shifting the
burden to the urban poor in the less developed or 'emergent, '
developing nations.
"Free Markets and Food Riots" explores this general proposition
in a cross-national study of the austerity protests, or the 'IMF
Riots' that have affected so many debtor nations since the
mid-1970s. The book argues that modern austerity protests, like the
classical "bread riots" in eighteenth-century Europe are political
acts aimed at injustice, but acts that are an integral part of the
process of international economic and political restructuring.
Modern food riots are most important for what they reveal about
global economic transformation and its social, and political,
consequences.
Successive chapters provide a general framework (drawing on
comparative and historical material) and then trace the cycle of
uneven development, debt, neo-liberal reform, andprotest in Latin
America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
Additional chapters focus on the role of women in structural
adjustment and protest politics and the features of seemingly
anomalous cases which qualify the general argument.
General
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