A Well-Adjusted Debt: How the International Anti-Debt Movement Failed to Delink Debt Relief and Structural Adjustment

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.