The co-authors of Human Rights and Structural Adjustment, M. Rodwan Abouharb and David Cingranelli, present a simple and straightforward argument: the economic reform programs initiated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in the 1980s, which tended to be lumped together under the awkward phrase "structural adjustment," caused a progressive worsening of human rights conditions in the countries that undertook them. The longer a country was exposed to structural adjustment, the worse the country's human rights conditions became. To make matters worse, these authors argue, there is little or no convincing evidence that these economic reform programs led to improved economic performance or, in any case, that they led to improved economic performance with social equity. The authors leave no room for ambiguity as to where they stand in regards to the effects of market-based policy changes in transitional societies. One chapter connects economic reform with "Torture, Murder, Disappearance and Political Imprisonment" (Chapter 8) while another links economic reforms to heightened levels of ethnic strife, civil war and other extreme forms of political turbulence.

One's first thought is to ask what might have prompted such a one-dimensional treatment. Is 2008 the new 1980s, when such views were still relatively new and more likely to produce serious academic controversy? Perhaps the authors had their own doubts, which may explain their repeated insistence on scientific methodology. But the claims to scientific methods do not add to the plausibility of arguments that are, at their core, both empirically weak and ahistorical. We are insistently told that the authors' statistical correlations are "robust" and that there is no "selection bias" in the choice of cases. For the more quantitatively minded, there is even a discussion of the choice of logit and probit as statistical programs. And at one point we are treated to proof by counter-factual-a suggestion that the countries that adopted adjustment programs would have been better off had they not done so in the first place. There is a touch of insecurity in the authors' insistence that their open-mindedness is demonstrated by their willingness to cite studies with different points of view. Those studies are casually brushed aside at every turn.

What are we to make of a volume like this? Ironically, one reasonable reaction would be a sense of relief. Scholarship that preaches to the previously committed is fairly commonplace in both academic life and in policy circles and, regrettably, seems unusually common among studies in this genre. For the most part, the academic world treats such scholarship in fairly predictable ways. Demonizing the Washington-based international lending institutions (ILIs) is nothing new, and this volume will be treated by most readers as simply one more treatise in the already over-crowded World Bank-bashing genre. On page 21, the authors state that "Libraries are full of case studies showing the negative effects of structural adjustment." While undoubtedly true, it would be more helpful to know how many of these studies have genuinely added to our understanding of the short and long term effects of economic reform. Academics and policymakers who are seeking a more balanced presentation of the costs and benefits of economic reform or guidance in how to make the process of reform proceed more effectively will not find it here.

On the other side will be those already persuaded that market-based economic reforms are indeed responsible for the economic ills and some of the most grievous political shortcomings of the developing world. These readers will take great consolation in this volume and, no doubt, treat it with acclaim as persuasive evidence of the negative effects of these institutions.

Much more could have been done to provide real value to the already considerable stock of literature on this topic. Now that nearly three decades have elapsed since the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund began to engage in market-conditioned lending to developing countries, the stage is set for a complex assessment of the gains and costs of those programs. A host of questions cries out for careful answers. The first question is straightforward: Is it really plausible, as this book implies, that the centrally planned economic systems that preceded market-based economic reforms in these countries were really freer and more humanitarian than those that followed? It is doubtful. Centrally planned economies are intrinsically unfree. It is in the very nature of central planning that once a multiyear plan has been set in place, opposition and flexibility cannot be tolerated lest these imperil the long-term goals of the plan. How seriously, then, are we really to take the implicit premise that the centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa of the 1960s and 1970s exhibited a greater scope for human rights? Or that the human rights environment became progressively degraded when those governments began to loosen their controls over their economic systems? no amount of logit and probit modeling is likely to convince readers that this is anything but a very one-sided volume.

The authors echo the critics of the World Bank, who in the 1980s and 1990s suggested that World Bank conditionality required the removal of subsidies and benefits for poor and socio-economically deprived segments of the population, as if social cruelty were an integral part of the ILIs' agenda. This leads directly to the second question to be posed to the authors: is it not at least equally plausible that many of the governments of these regions approach the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for financial assistance precisely because their economies were so degraded that they were no longer able to provide these subsidies themselves, and needed external resources to be able to do so?

Historical experience has shown that the pre-reform economies of these societies, which typically featured rampant corruption, dysfunctional state enterprises, insanely over-valued currencies, high rates of inflation and completely unsustainable fiscal and trade deficits, had already reached their worst. Not only had the resources for social equity long since disappeared, but in many instances, the approach to the World Bank and the IMF was occasioned by the simple fact that even the relatively minimal resources to sustain authoritarian rule were no longer present. Anyone with even the slightest experience of life and living in pre-reform economies can attest to the utterly immiserated conditions that typically prevailed. These included chronic shortages of even the most basic staple goods and price gouging by ever present black market salesmen, often the political clients of precisely those leaders publicly vocalizing an ethos of social equity. In country after country, those politically well connected formed a privileged elite, able to take advantage of a social environment in which human rights could be easily ignored. As a result, the rhetoric of social equality generally concealed an extreme inequality in the actual distribution of resources. In the political realm, extremes of wealth and poverty were often enforced by a police state system whose purpose was to squelch even the slightest movement in the direction of exercising human and political rights.