This article interrogates the social impact of one aspect of structural adjustment in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: privatization. In the mid-2000s, King Abdullah II privatized Jordan's minerals industry as part of the regime's accelerated neoliberal project. While many of these privatizations elicited responses ranging from general approval to ambivalence, the opaque and seemingly corrupt sale of the Jordan Phosphate Mines Company (JPMC) in 2006 was understood differently, as an illegitimate appropriation of Jordan's national resources and, by extension, an abrogation of the state's (re-) distributive obligations. Based on interviews with activists, I argue that a diverse cross-section of social movement constituencies – spanning labour and non-labour movements (and factions within and across those movements) – perceived such illegitimate privatizations as a moral violation, which, in turn, informed transgressive activist practices and discourses targeting the neoliberal state. This moral violation shaped the rise and interaction of labour and non-labour social movements in Jordan's “Arab uprisings”, peaking in 2011–2013. While Jordan's uprisings were largely demobilized after 2013, protests in 2018 and 2019 demonstrate the continued relevance of this discourse. In this way, the 2011–2013 wave of protests – and their current reverberations – differ qualitatively from Jordan's earlier wave of “food riots” in 1989 (and throughout the 1990s), which I characterize as primarily restorative in nature.

This article offers a sensitive reading of oppositional political cartoons in Togo in the early 1990s, during the period of structural adjustment, which was accompanied by the swift reversal of democratizing trends and the restoration of authoritarian rule. Togolese satirists perceived this moment as a moment of “fraudonomics”, thus contesting rampant corruption and clientelism in politics. They poked fun at the president, local politicians, businesspeople, and bureaucrats of the international institutions. The article begins by examining the making of satirical newspapers with a focus on the biographies of the satirists. As students, they started out on the adventure of publication with their own money and learned most of their drawing and printing techniques as work progressed. Secondly, an analysis of the readership shows that, although the satirical newspapers were a crucial element of the media in the early 1990s, it was mostly an elitist and urban phenomenon. The third section analyses the changing visual repertoire of contention through in-depth analysis of four selected caricatures.

In recorded memory, the 1977 uprising in Egypt appears as the end of a cycle. Yet, at an international level, it marks the beginning of a wave of protest against International Monetary Fund measures. In this article, I study how communist memories of the uprising, which are the only ones recorded, have built up a disregard for 1977's “immature” insurgents. The article investigates how these narratives can inform us about the history of the uprising and argues that the search for a Cartesian-type collective subject among insurgents limits our understanding of the insurrection. It refers extensively to the Alexandria Arsenal, a state-owned shipbuilding company where the uprising began, and the relationship between this “vanguard” and the rest of the insurgents. It deconstructs the theoretical presupposition of an analogy between insurgents and a Cartesian subject that permeates the sources, and also the concepts of “collective memory” and “moral economy”. This leads inevitably to the diagnosis of a defective subject. It favours the concept of “fluid memory” and highlights other “January 1977s”.

In the early 1990s, Niger saw growing anger towards the military regime in power, not only because of police violence, but also due to its economic and social policies, particularly its first structural adjustment programme. After several months of revolts, the regime fell, giving way to a democratic government in 1991. Under pressure from international financial institutions, the new government quickly embarked on the same economic and social path as the previous one and adopted an adjustment policy, resistance to which had played a fundamental role in its accession to power. The government faced increasing street protests, and was overthrown by the army in January 1996, with most of the population not mobilizing to protect the democratic institutions. This article examines the conflicts of rationales that marked these few years, and shows how, by whom, and to what extent these rationales were opposed in practical terms. It also offers a social history of the adjustments by looking at how they were received by the people. By so doing, it looks back at a moment that has profoundly marked Niger's recent history: in this country, as in others, the adjustments have reconfigured rivalries, produced violence, and left an indelible mark on the political imaginary up to the present day.

This article analyses the process by which the issues of debt and structural adjustment were redefined by a plurality of actors, from institutional experts to activists, during the 1980s and 1990s. Although it mainly focuses on the 1990s, when the Jubilee 2000 campaign emerged, blossomed, and died, it takes into account the institutional mobilization preceding it. It then points to the need to think about the dynamics of competition and the division of labour among international players. While the leading Jubilee 2000 coalition in the Global North opposed debt on economic and religious grounds, African anti-structural adjustment programme (SAP) activists who joined the Jubilee Afrika campaign promoted an alternative framework: according to them, debt was not just economically “unsustainable”; it was first and foremost “illegitimate”, as were any conditions attached to its reduction, beginning with the implementation of SAPs. The story of the anti-debt campaign is the story of their failure.