Adjustment and Aftermath: Structural Conditionality, Social Contract Erosion, and the Political Economy of African Conflict

This article examines how IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programmes weakened the institutional and distributive foundations through which many African states had previously managed conflict and social expectation in Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, and comparative reference to Mozambique and broader sub-Saharan adjustment experiences. It asks how adjustment-induced social-contract erosion structures political order during the 1980s to the present, with attention to long-run legacies, combining dependency theory, the political economy of international financial institutions, social contract theory, and historical institutionalism with a research design centred on historical comparative analysis of structural adjustment across African cases, panel-based linkage to conflict onset, and process tracing of adjustment-to-conflict pathways in selected states. The central argument is that the issue under study is not best explained as a discrete policy failure or a short-lived crisis. Rather, it is reproduced through linked institutional and political mechanisms that reshape incentives, authority, and access to resources over time (Stiglitz, 2002; Babb, 2005) (Dreher, 2009; Mkandawire & Soludo, 1999). Across the paper, the analysis tracks how these mechanisms operate in practice, what variation they generate, and why reform agendas that ignore the underlying political settlement rarely succeed. The article therefore contributes both a conceptual synthesis and a grounded comparative interpretation of the focal case. Its wider implication is that durable reform requires institutional redesign, political bargaining, and accountability strategies capable of reaching the real sites where power is exercised (Mosley, Harrigan, & Toye, 1991; van de Walle, 2001) (Ferguson, 200