When 'Adjusted' People Rebel: Volume 29
Economic Liberalization and Social revolts in Africa and the Middle East (1980s to the present day)

This volume examines social movements and unrest in the Middle East and Africa and the implementation of neoliberal economic policies.

Leyla Dakhli (Edited by), Vincent Bonnecase (Edited by)

9781009069960, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 June 2021

240 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.34 kg

In the Middle East and Africa, deteriorating living conditions have given rise to a variety of social movements and unrest since the 1970s. Although each of these events and movements had its own logic, they all took place in the context of the implementation of neoliberal economic policies, generally referred to as structural adjustment reforms. Structural adjustments have been the subject of extensive literature, but most existing studies have focused on the logic of international financial institutions, national governments, and private enterprises. By focusing on the revolts against, and more generally on the multiple social responses to structural adjustments policies, this volume suggests that the perspective should be reversed. It investigates the ways in which the upheavals brought about by this new liberalization were actually experienced by the people of Africa and the Middle East in their daily and material lives and their shared concepts of fairness and unfairness.

1. Introduction: interpreting the global economy through local anger Leyla Dakhli and Vincent Bonnecase
2. Remembering the 1977 bread riots in Suez: fragments and ghosts of resistance Nayera Abdelrahman Soliman
3. The fair value of bread: Tunisia, 28 December 1983–6 January 1984 Leyla Dakhli
4. 'We cannot please everyone': contentions over adjustment in EPRDF Ethiopia (1991–2018) Mehdi Labzaé and Sabine Planel
5. Peasant resistance in Burkina Faso's cotton sector Bettina Engels
6. Privatizing the commons: protest and the moral economy of national resources in Jordan Matthew Lacouture
7. 'Fraudonomics': cartooning against structural adjustment in Togo Robin Frisch
8. International Monetary Fund riots or Nasserian revolt? Thinking fluid memories: Egypt 1977 Mélanie Henry
9. Democracy and adjustment in Niger: a conflict of rationales Vincent Bonnecase
10. A well-adjusted debt: how the international anti-debt movement failed to delink debt relief and structural adjustment Hélène Baillot.

Subject Areas: Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions [HBTV], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], African history [HBJH], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]