Yes, say Caroline A. Hartzell, Matthew Hoddie, and Molly Bauer in this article (gated) in the most recent issue of International Organization. The authors contend that IMF structural adjustment reforms create new losers that a weak government suffering from a financial crisis has difficulties coping with. They then show that entering an IMF program is associated with an increased risk of civil war onset. There are some obvious endogeneity issues here: It is difficult to tell whether it is the financial crisis or the IMF program that does the harm. The authors go some way towards dealing with this, although their method does rely on some pretty strong assumptions (this is not to say that it is obvious how to do this better: this is a really hard problem). Yet, this is an important paper with some interesting implications: rocking the boat to straighten the financial ship may well have unintended political consequences that can do more harm. Certainly an area that warrants more research. The abstract is below.
Previous studies that have explored the effects of economic liberalization on civil war have employed aggregate measures of openness and have failed to account for potential endogeneity bias. In this research note, we suggest two improvements to the study of the relationship between liberalization and civil war. First, emphasizing that it is processes that systematically create new economic winners and losers rather than particular levels of economic openness that have the potential to generate conflict, we consider the effects of one oft-used means of liberalizing economies: the adoption by countries of International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programs. Second, we use a bivariate probit model to address issues of endogeneity bias. Analyzing all data available for the period between 1970 and 1999, we identify an association between the adoption of IMF programs and the onset of civil war. This finding suggests that IMF programs to promote economic openness unintentionally may be creating an environment conducive to domestic conflict.