States of Unrest III : Resistance to IMF and World Bank policies in poor countries

This report, like its predecessors, is about people responding to the imposition of ‘economic restructuring’ by national governments at the behest of the IMF and World Bank. The willingness of ordinary people to take to the streets in large numbers in direct action reflects their anger and outrage at what they see as the breaking of an unwritten ‘social contract’ with their governments to provide basic protection for ordinary citizens at least as much as it does the undoubtedly very real hardship and threat to livelihoods posed by price increases, unemployment and other forms of austerity.

The three reports produced so far by WDM cover the period after ‘Seattle’ (November 1999). But such widespread, popular protest against austerity measures, undertaken as part of a process of ‘global adjustment’, is not new. Through the second half of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, ordinary people took to the streets in their thousands – sometimes in their tens of thousands – to protest against economic liberalisation and the hardships it created, especially for the poor. What is significant is that, today, there is a greater awareness, not only of the globalisation project itself, but also of the possibility of protest and resistance. It is not too utopian to speak of an ‘anti-globalisation movement’ – a global movement for social justice – which has found expression across the ‘developing’ as well as the ‘developed’ world.

These reports are an invaluable contribution as they chart and publicise the fact that resistance is possible, that it is world-wide, and that it may eventually prove able to create real opportunities, for people not just to express their anger and hurt but also to open up new ‘spaces’ for alternative processes – political, social and economic – giving rise eventually to alternative, more socially beneficial forms of global development.