Conclusion

In contemplating the future horizons of stabilization policy and practice, it is useful to reflect on the concept's origins. Indeed, the underlying impetus for stabilization can be traced back to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paranoia in metropolitan capitals stemming from disorder in the colonial hinterlands and of the ‘great unwashed’ at the city's outer edges. It also echoes Cold-War-era fears of the (presumed) linkages between poverty and communism and, later, liberation theology and incipient nationalist independence movements. In other words, elites at the centre have long been wedded to the idea of stabilizing the periphery — whether by force or through less brutal means. ¹ As Thucydides predicted in the fifth century bc, ‘the events which happened in the past … will at some time or other and in much the same way be repeated in the future’.