Free Markets and Food Riots

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». 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 Argues that modern austerity protests, like the classical «bread riots» in eighteenth-century Europe are political acts aimed at injustice, but acts that are a…