Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global Adjustment

by John K. Walton, David Seddon

Overview

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, and protest 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781444399813
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	08/10/2011
Series:	IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change Book Series , #64
Sold by:	JOHN WILEY & SONS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	396
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

John Walton holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He is author of Reluctant Rebels: Comparative Studies of Revolution and Underdevelopment (1984) and most recently Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California (1992).

David Seddon is Professor of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and has written extensively on "the politics of structural adjustment".

Table of Contents

List of Tables.

Acknowledgements.

Part I: Introduction:.

1. Global Adjustment.

2. Food Riots Past and Present.

Part II: Case Studies:.

3. Fighting for Survival: Women's Responses to Austerity Programs.

4. Latin America: Popular Protest and the State.

5. Economic Adjustment and Democratization in Africa.

6. The Middle East and North Africa.

7. The Asian Debt Crisis: Structural Adjustment and Popular Protest in India.

8. Explaining Sri Lanka's Exceptionalism: Popular Responses to Welfarism and the 'Open Economy'.

9. The Politics of Economic Reform in Central and Eastern Europe.

Part III: Conclusion:.

10. Debt Crisis and Democratic Transition.

Bibliography.

Index.