The basic argument of this book is that the crisis and process of reconstruction of global capitalism that began in the late-1960s±early-1970s generated the economic policies of liberalization and austerity that in turn have given rise to an upsurge of popular unrest across the developing world (including the former command economies of the Second World'). In the 1970s the global economic crisis was characterized in particular by a ®nancial crisis with growing international ®nancial instability and indebtedness. The debt crisis of the early-1980s triggered increased intervention in macro policy making by both the IMF (via stabilization policies) and the World Bank (via structural adjustment programmes). A wave' of popular protest (food riots) has accompanied stabilization and restructuring which dier from earlier European popular protests in that modern food riots occur in response to a new and ever more integrated global system' (p. 23). . . . modern food riots in the developing nations are generated by processes analogous to economic liberalisation policies that produced classical food riots but today's transformation is taking place at the international level. Neo-liberalism simultaneously aects all Third World countries in much the same fashion that laissez-faire policies within nations once aected particular towns and regions . . . ' (p. 24).
That people should protest over a deterioration in their real standard of living is not surprising. The authors list 146 austerity protests' that have occurred in 39 countries over the period 1976±92. Given the dimensions of the global crisis, we may well remark on the relatively limited number of protests that have occurred. No details are given, except in the regional or country case studies of the length of severity of these protests, numbers involved, the damage caused, etc. No East Asian economies are included in the table and the only South East Asian economy to appear is the Philippines (1980), long regarded as the least successful economy in the region. When the authors assert, therefore, that the food is a common, perhaps even universal feature of market societies' (p. 54), they should perhaps have inserted unsuccessful' in front of market'.
The regional and country case studies present a wealth of detail and discuss the internal dimensions of crisis and response. In Latin America, quantative analysis suggests that orthodox measures of dependency' are not associated with protest but that urbanization and overurbanization' (whatever that might mean) are. Unfortunately no warning is inserted to indicate that correlation does not imply causation.
No one would deny that stabilization and structural adjustment programmes have distributed implication' (p. 41). Most critics of the IMF and the World Bank may wish to assert on a priori grounds that they lead to increased inequality and poverty but it behoves us to look for the evidence. Tony Killick in his comprehensive and judicious assessment of the impact of IMF programmes (IMF Programmes in Developing Countries: Design and Impact, Routledge, 1995, pp. 125±26) concludes that distribution eects are likely to be appreciable but also rather complex and varying from country to country. Furthermore he argues that The priorities of the government in power, rather than those of the IMF, are probably the principal determinant of the ways in which programmes impinge upon the poor'.
Sensibly the authors conclude that international interventions in Latin American societies in the form of austerity programmes combine with domestic structures that make vulnerable large number of people who are already organised in urban communities' (p. 118) (emphasis added). The excellent chapter on Africa also makes the point that not all protests were exclusively concerned with the eects of IMF/WB austerity programmes and that Austerity protests are thus part of a broader picture of opposition to the prevailing models of rules in many African polities ' (p. 168). In addition to the chapters mentioned above, there are very good chapters on the response of women to austerity, a Sri Lankan case study and a discussion of Eastern and central European experiences. This is an important book that will hopefully stimulate further research and debate.