Making war safe for capitalism: The World Bank and its evolving interventions in conflict

Abstract

The World Bank has asserted a dominant role in post-conflict peacebuilding and during war itself. This article critiques the World Bank’s evolving approach to war and peace through both a qualitative analysis of recent strategic documents and a case study of the Bank’s engagement in Ukraine during the war in Donbas. I identify three prominent themes that inform the World Bank’s evolving strategy for engaging in conflict-affected conditions, which may impact the possibilities for peace, whether conceptualized as negative, positive or a feminist peace. First, the rhetorical importance of governance is concretized to emphasize business solutions to economic and political problems; second, the conflict-affected population is reimagined in terms of human capital, emphasizing entrepreneurship and resilience; and third, private capital is presented as a saviour. I argue that, in practice, these imperatives lead to a further withdrawal of the state when social assistance and protection are most needed, the instrumentalization of the conflict-affected populace as receptacles of resilience and vassals of economic growth, and an emphasis on private capital as the principal social group to the exclusion of real people. I conclude by questioning whether World Bank reforms during conflict can positively contribute to peace.

Keywords

Gender peace peace and security peacebuilding Ukraine World Bank

Introduction

The International Financial Institutions (IFIs), predominantly the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, have been increasingly recognized as important partners for reconstruction and economic stabilization in peacebuilding (United Nations, 2016). The World Bank has particularly sought to expand its peacebuilding portfolio to include political dialogue, the prevention of violent extremism, general security and intervention into situations of active conflict (Warnecke, 2020: 635). Over the last 20 years, the World Bank has intervened during conflict in South Sudan, Yemen, Colombia, Iraq, the Philippines and Ukraine (World Bank, 2020d: 23). The IFIs have justified their engagement as partners in establishing peace (see UN and World Bank, 2018; World Bank, 2020d), as the World Bank tripled its budget for disbursements to conflict-affected states since 2017 to US$18.7 billion (World Bank, 2020d: 61). The World Bank has made a concerted effort to enhance its legitimacy as a peace-supporting actor during war, through the publications Pathways for Peace, produced with the UN (UN and World Bank, 2018), and the World Bank Group Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence 2020–2025 (World Bank, 2020d; henceforth, Strategy 2020–2025).

Some contemporary literature has accepted the role of the World Bank in situations of active conflict and has positively noted these publications without critical analysis (see Paffenholz and Zartman, 2019; Warnecke, 2020). However, the role of the IFIs in active conflict and peacebuilding, seemingly led by the World Bank, must be carefully scrutinized, not least because of the historically disastrous impacts that IFI programmes have had on vulnerable populations (Haddad, 2016: 20; Weaver, 2008: 142). The World Bank has also long considered the ‘conflict moment’ as an opportunity for ‘institutional and social change’ and ‘policy reforms . . . essential to macroeconomic stability’ (Kreimer et al., 1998: 23; World Bank, 2011b: 13), in a broader context where landscapes of war have been identified as ‘frontiers of capital’ (Kirsch and Flint, 2016: 44).

The purpose of this article is to situate the World Bank’s heightened involvement in war zones within the context of broader developments in the reorganization of a global, capitalist political economy. This article places the activities of the World Bank within an understanding of neoliberalism as variegated, which accounts for not only the institutional imposition of economic policies along with political governmentality of subjects, with the latter’s intertwined responses and resistances, but also the very unevenness of market-oriented development across context and space (Brenner, Peck and Theodore, 2010). The imperative for growth and profit characteristic of capitalism is still the fundamental lynchpin of neoliberalism(s), though informed by a rationality that embeds speculative individualism across all social relations to fashion a neoliberal society (Dardot and Laval, 2013). A critical political economy approach to contemporary neoliberalism must account for such relations across the household, markets and state and into globalized production, reproduction and conflict (Hozić and True, 2017). In a variegated neoliberal rationality, there is not only a homogenous, structural imposition of top-down policies, which the World Bank stipulates in tandem with national governments, but also reciprocal activity at the mundane, everyday level from individual receptions of policies and ideology that sustains, replicates and, possibly, challenges neoliberalism. Active war presents a unique context for the development of neoliberal society, a time of violent upheaval, and it is an open question as to whether, and how, the World Bank seeks to construct such a society through peacebuilding.

This article interrogates this question while contributing to the literature that has critiqued IFI and Western donor engagement in the peri-conflict moment (see Cohn and Duncanson, 2020; Haddad, 2016; True and Hozić, 2020). Critical engagement with the World Bank’s approach to conflict is timely. The institution has been increasingly legitimized to engage in conflict-affected countries (United Nations, 2016) and it is currently updating its operational policies within violent contexts (World Bank, 2020d: 40). The Bank has also expanded its conflict-related financing to 20–25% of total lending (Seatzu, 2019: 197; World Bank, 2020d: 61–62), while allocating $7.5 billion to its development arm, the International Development Association (IDA), for specifically conflict-affected situations (World Bank, 2020b: 1). Conflict-related interventions are now ‘a central priority embedded in the [Bank]’ (World Bank, 2020d: 15, 2020b: iii).

The article argues that the World Bank’s interventions into conflict, and its neoliberal fundamentalist assumptions, are antagonistic to the possibilities of peace. Classic scholarship and international organizations typically understand ‘peace’ as simply being an absence of ‘high-intensity violent conflict’ (UN and World Bank, 2018: 83) – a ‘negative peace’. However, critical work has agitated for both a ‘positive peace’, which demands the replacement of violence and discrimination by social justice (Juncos and Joseph, 2020) and, more contemporaneously, a ‘feminist peace’. The latter accounts for other types of violence that exist outside of the battlefield (Kirsch and Flint, 2016: 40), and demands a peace that addresses ‘continuums of violence and peace that extend from the home and community to the public spaces of international relations’ (True, 2020: 87). Through this concept of a feminist peace, the following critique highlights the failings of the World Bank, not only in its inability to reduce violent conflict, but through engendering other types of violence, inequalities and injustices (Reardon, 2015: 65).

The method of this article combines a close reading and inductive coding of two key World Bank documents with empirical analysis of contemporary Bank interventions in a situation of active conflict – the war in Donbas, Ukraine. This dual methodology addresses the limitations of relying on a reading of Bank publications to understand its activities, considering the complexity of the institution and the differentiated way policies may be applied (Calkin, 2018: 92).¹ The research employed qualitative data analysis software (NVivo 12) to ascertain key themes within Pathways for Peace and Strategy 2020–2025, following the methodology adopted by Prügl (2017). Initial codes were derived from scholarship on the IFIs, such as ‘development’, ‘privatization’, ‘poverty’ and ‘market’, while approximately 50 codes were added through mostly analytical, though some descriptive, coding of the publications. The coding revealed three major themes: governance, with sub-codes of ‘government responsibility’ and ‘sovereignty’; human capital, with a sub-code of ‘gender’; and private capital. These recurred frequently and were substantially important, determined through a close reading of the texts and iterative juxtapositions with the broader literature and other Bank documents.

This article also draws on empirical data from face-to-face, semi-structured interviews completed in Ukraine in late 2018. Ukraine has been engulfed by war since 2014, with the conflict raging between the Ukrainian Armed Forces and ‘pro-Russian’ separatist groups over a 427km contact line through the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetska and Luhanska, collectively the Donbas. As this article was prepared for print (late February 2022), the Russian army formally invaded Ukraine, engendering further violence and destruction. The IFIs have had a comprehensive history of reform in Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union (Yurchenko, 2018), with further radical economic restructuring occurring during the war (Dolan-Evans, 2021). Consent was received from all participants, and to protect participants’ privacy, no names are used.

A brief explanation is necessary regarding the World Bank’s typology of ‘conflict-affected countries’ within their yearly ‘List of Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations’ (FCS list) and broader financing and project work, set out in Pathways for Peace and Strategy 2020–2025. Ukraine does not (as of early 2022), and has never, appeared on the World Bank’s yearly FCS list.² This is despite Ukraine comfortably meeting the Bank’s criteria for inclusion as in ‘medium-intensity conflict’,³ and it being noted consistently as ‘in conflict’ in Bank publications (World Bank, 2018, 2020c, 2021a, 2021e) and in country-specific programming documents (World Bank 2015b, 2015c, 2017a, 2021f). It may superficially appear problematic for the methodology of this study to use Ukraine as a case study, considering it is excluded from the Bank’s FCS list.

However, analysing World Bank work in Ukraine is appropriate, as the Bank’s strategy towards conflict-affected situations is not limited to the FCS list. Indeed, Pathways for Peace is aimed ‘broadly at conflict-affected countries’ (UN and World Bank, 2018: 1–2), whereas Strategy 2020–2025 guides Bank engagement ‘in all countries facing [conflict] challenges, including those at higher income levels’, with Ukraine named (World Bank, 2020d: 2, 105). Ukraine’s exclusion from the Bank’s FCS list appears to be for two main reasons. First, Ukraine is an ‘IBRD (International Bank of Reconstruction and Development) country’ that does not disclose its Country Policy and Institutional Assessment, a multi-sector measurement of economic performance, and does not have an international peacekeeping mission (unlike IBRD countries Iraq, Lebanon and Libya), technically excluding it from the list.⁴ Ukraine is classified as an IBRD country because it is a ‘lower middle-income’ economy,⁵ with a GNI per capita of US$3,540.⁶ Second, if Ukraine were included on the Bank’s FCS list it could access either more flexible financing at favourable maturities as an IBRD country,⁷ or be reclassified as an IDA country and receive concessional lending and eligibility for debt waivers.⁸ This would be problematic for the IFIs as Ukraine is one of the largest borrowers of IMF and Bank money (Yurchenko, 2018: 157). The Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (World Bank, 2014: xli, lvi) has criticized the FCS list and related ‘fragility’ classifications as inconsistent, exclusionary and error-prone, with research highlighting that such typology is intensely political (Nay, 2014). The rationale behind, and impacts of, the typology of the Bank’s FCS list classification may warrant further study.

This article proceeds in three parts. The first part details the historical engagement of the IFIs in peacebuilding, related to their broader development agenda, and how this has metamorphosized over time. The second part discusses the results of a textual analysis of the World Bank’s Pathways for Peace and Strategy 2020–2025, critiquing the fundamentals of the Bank’s approach to conflict intervention. This critique is informed by current literature, IFI documents and interviews in Ukraine. The final part concludes by assessing the possibility for the emergence of a feminist peace alongside World Bank programming during war.

The new age of consensus: IFIs and peacebuilding

It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a detailed discussion of the World Bank’s genesis following World War II and subsequent decades of IFI activity. This part, rather, broadly traces the role of the IFIs, particularly the World Bank, during active conflict and in post-conflict peacebuilding. The Bank’s work in peri-conflict settings is imbricated with its broader focus on development, and it is useful to situate this discussion within the 1980s when neoliberal economic thought was becoming dominant and the Washington Consensus pervaded development circles. This consensus prescribed a policy package of financial and trade liberalization, fiscal discipline, access for foreign capital, privatization and deregulation for development (Williamson, 1996), which emerged within a broader material and ideological milieu where the state was delegitimized as an agent of development while the market was exalted (McNally, 2012). The IFIs enforced global neoliberal political economy transformations, infamously through the decade of structural adjustment lending (Weaver, 1995). From a development perspective, the implementation of the Washington Consensus was a disaster and negatively impacted people within recipient countries, delegitimizing the IFIs (Weaver, 2008).

Following the 1980s, two major developments were crucial in catalysing the World Bank’s involvement in peri-conflict peacebuilding: global geopolitical changes, and the Bank’s move to the ‘Post-Washington Consensus’ development paradigm. First, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant that neoliberal capitalism was the ‘only game in town’. The World Bank, though reeling from critiques against its structural adjustment programmes, saw the end of the Cold War as an opportunity to ‘usher in a new age of consensus’ in support of a ‘capitalist peace’ for conflict-affected areas (World Bank, 2011b: 25). The Bank’s president at the time, James Wolfensohn, placed conflict-related financing as a top priority (Boyce and Pastor, 1998: 43). This emerging orientation of a ‘neoliberal peace’ was characterized by the belief that universally desirable, Western market-led institutional models could be exported to a post-conflict country and would promote economic growth while ensuring security (Chandler, 2017). Ideas of state sovereignty and representative democracies were subsumed under the necessity to stabilize fragile or failing states and ensure security for economic growth and the movement of global capital (Chandler, 2017: 33–34). With this post-conflict development paradigm, both the IMF and World Bank positioned themselves as a positive force for peace (Boyce and Pastor, 1998: 43), with the Bank also formalizing a ‘Post-Conflict Unit’ in 1998 (World Bank, 1998). Subsequently, the IFIs became involved in Rwanda, East Timor, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Palestine, El Salvador and Lebanon, designing legislation and prescribing the post-conflict economic model.

Second, the World Bank rhetorically reframed its programming to focus on social impacts and alleviating poverty (Reinold, 2017), putting a ‘human face’ to neoliberalism under the ‘Post-Washington Consensus’ paradigm (Cornia, Jolly and Stewart, 1990). This entailed a discursive shift away from a singular focus on markets to one that also welcomed the state, but only as a creator, facilitator and protector of centripetal market forces for development (Van Waeyenberge, Fine and Bayliss, 2011). However, despite this discourse, most Bank lending continued to be in the form of the much-maligned structural adjustment loans with conditionalities attached (Kreimer et al., 1998: 13, 23).

However, this neoliberal mandate for peace faced constant failure by the end of the 1990s. Continued instability, re-emergent conflict or a lack of legitimacy hampered the recovery of ‘post-conflict’ states who received IFI financing and policy prescriptions. Despite this, the IFIs became firmly embedded within peacebuilding with the USA-led ‘War on Terror’ in the early 2000s. The IFIs’ mandate in peacebuilding operations was formalized by the UN Security Council (United Nations, 2003), which called on their assistance to coordinate reconstruction efforts in Iraq, decimated by USA-led forces. Intense academic work at the World Bank, led by Paul Collier, also sought to place the institution at the pinnacle of knowledge concerning development in conflict, encapsulated by the 2003 report Breaking the Conflict Trap (Cramer and Goodhand, 2011). Concurrently, the Post-Washington Consensus also became hegemonic in peacebuilding thought, privileging a neoliberal economy, stability and privatization (Chandler, 2017: 40, 75). Mainstream authors, such as Keohane (2003: 296–297), suggested that post-conflict countries should aspire to move from ‘notional sovereignty’ to ‘integrated sovereignty’, where ‘fragile states’ were straightjacketed into international institutional frameworks that could override domestic will. This growing imperative in development thinking encouraged post-conflict states to integrate into the international financial system (Mawdsley, 2018), as the World Bank also increasingly engaged with private firms as clientele (Van Waeyenberge, Fine and Bayliss, 2011: 11).

The publication of Pathways for Peace and Strategy 2020–2025 took place within a broader reorientation of IFI discursive practices since the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Despite the pervasive financialization of everyday life, growing global inequality, collapse of collective social support and neoliberal economic restructuring that contributed to the GFC (Kotz, 2015), the IFIs continue to promote more privatization, competitiveness and growth (World Bank, 2010: 5). Rhetorically, the IFIs have promoted ‘kinder’ economic programmes that carry fewer conditionalities, as infamously argued by then IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde (IMF, 2014). Notwithstanding this pretence, structural reforms attached to IFI loans have proliferated in recent years (Kentikelenis et al., 2016). Critics have argued that IFI discourse, despite its veneers of ‘inclusion’, ‘feminism’ or ‘local-led’, obscures an intensification of a singular focus towards mobilizing populations in the service of economic growth (Allan, 2019; Calkin, 2018).

The role of the IFIs in peacebuilding has evolved to condition the emergence of neoliberalizing institutions, dismantle trade barriers, reduce labour protections and connect conflict-affected states to global circuits of capital (Richmond, 2018). Arguably, the World Bank’s engagement in peacebuilding subverts the constraints imposed on its activities by the ‘political prohibition’ clause within its Articles of Agreement, which prohibits the Bank from interfering in political affairs of member states.⁹ Indeed, the Bank consistently justifies its interventions on ‘economic’ grounds to legitimize its involvement in sectors previously considered the right of sovereign nations (see World Bank, 2011b: 28, 30, 192–193, 274; 2020c: 12), such as justice, security, policing and violence-prevention (Janse, 2013; Pereira, 2016; World Bank, 2011b: 30, 276). Although the IFIs frame their interventions as purely economic and technical, their reconstruction efforts in conflict-affected countries condition the ‘boundaries of what is politically acceptable’ by instituting neoliberal institutions, rationalities and possibilities (Haddad, 2016: 71). The next section analyses two key documents that outline the World Bank’s emerging approach to intervening in conflict-affected states, in collaboration with the IMF (World Bank, 2020d: 54), interrogating the assumptions and foundations of its interventions alongside the material impacts of its application during the war in Donbas.

The World Bank in conflict

Governing violence

The role of the state in conflict, along with broader notions of government and sovereignty, sits at an apparent impasse in contemporary World Bank documents. Previously, there has been a reasonably clear evolution of the state’s function in development, as it transitioned from a key functionary that aid and technical assistance worked with to enact development in the post-war years, to an institution, like any other in the neoliberal age, whose role is to create, facilitate and protect markets (Chandler, 2010). Or, in the Bank’s terms, government is limited to ‘ensuring the rule of law, particularly over property issues, for elites’ (World Bank, 2011b: 105). In the coding of World Bank publications, there is a palpable tension between these two conceptions of the state, with the grudging recognition that the state may have a role in social protection within a conflict environment. This prima facie contradiction that appears within Pathways for Peace and Strategy 2020–2025 can be clarified with an appreciation of the historical transformation of the state in the Bank’s thinking, alongside an appraisal of the Bank-mediated Housing Utilities Subsidy programme in Ukraine from 2014, designed ostensibly to support Ukraine’s poorest citizens afford utility bills during war.

The Post-Washington Consensus zeitgeist of the 1990s–2000s engendered a reintroduction of the state into development as a guarantor of the market through promoting the idea of ‘good governance’. The centrality of ‘good governance’ to Bank policy quickly manifested following the 1989 report Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (World Bank, 1989: 60–61). The apparent need to improve ‘governance’ in African society at this moment reflected a concern by the World Bank that the state was not only invalidated as a mediator of resource allocation, but ‘incapable of effecting the transformation in institutions, social structures, and habits necessary for a flourishing market economy to emerge’ (Williams, 1999: 90). Of course, the political exigency for the ‘governance’ formulation by the Bank was to explain the catastrophic failure of its structural adjustment programmes, predominantly targeting African countries, by blaming the recipient states and governments themselves (Abrahamsen, 2000: 41–42).

Since this early deployment, ‘governance’ has been utilized as a buzzword in the political sciences, mobilized to signify ‘any strategy, process, procedure or program for controlling, regulating or managing problems on a global, national, local or organizational level’ (Lemke, 2007: 53). The use of constellations of ‘governance’ is not empty discursive posturing, but represents a deliberate, programmatic effort to construct a commonsense understanding of how the state should act (i.e. liberalization of trade/finance barriers) and where it should not (i.e. wealth redistribution). In this manner, the governmental rationality engendered through governance discourse has reorientated the state toward ensuring the economization of all aspects of life while complementing and protecting private capital (Brown, 2015: 128). As Lemke (2007: 54–55) argues, governance discourse ‘promotes a technocratic model’ of government-as-consultation with apolitical economic and social actors to find ‘gold-standard’ technical solutions in the era of an ‘end of politics’. This is reflected in development more broadly, where the state has been viewed as a ‘moderator and facilitator of actions of . . . public and private stakeholders’ in the 2030 Agenda and Addis Ababa Action Agenda (Martens, 2020: 208–209).

However, this conception is not a simple evisceration of state sovereignty and appears to offer contradictory positions. On the one hand, the Bank (and UN) have highlighted that conflict prevention is predominantly a state responsibility (UN and World Bank, 2018: 6, 86). Indeed, in the context of economic crashes, war and the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bank has called for the strengthening of government responses to crises (World Bank, 2021b: 11–12). Pathways for Peace laments the eroding trust in, and legitimacy of, state governments (UN and World Bank, 2018: 84), highlighting how a lack of government-led ‘service delivery’ can ‘stoke grievances’ or ‘undermine perceptions of government’ (UN and World Bank, 2018: 158). The Bank (2020d: 35) argues that ‘inclusive and effective social sector service delivery . . . [improves] state legitimacy and trust’. On the other hand, the Bank (2020d: 10) simultaneously displaces the centrality of the state and claims that it is a weakness of broader governance that drives conflict, supporting previous notions that non-state institutions are vital to ‘restor[ing] confidence’ (World Bank, 2011b: 12). Throughout Strategy 2020–2025, government responsibility is diminished in favour of other actors, with the World Bank (2020d: 19) highlighting the necessity to strengthen ‘core institutions and inclusive governance’ through building the capacity of ‘local authorities, communities, markets, customary institutions, civil society, and private sector actors’.

This may superficially appear as a contradiction in the approach to governance by the World Bank, but it hides a clear organizing logic. Since the 2030 Agenda negotiations in 2015, the Bank has become more explicit in its assertion that public money is insufficient to meet development goals, and that private capital must be mobilized (World Bank et al., 2015). The state is considered weak and eviscerated in developing countries (UN and World Bank, 2018: 84), though the Bank does not reflect on its own historic role in dismantling state capacities and privatizing responsibilities (Kotz, 2015; Weaver, 2008). As such, the Bank subtly dethrones the state in Strategy 2020–2025, arguing that any institution can deliver typically government-led services, with the state given a monitoring role (World Bank, 2020d: 35) as the Bank entertains disbursing its resources directly to third parties, bypassing the state (World Bank, 2020d: 53). The state’s role is circumscribed to ‘developing the private sector, and ensuring resilience to shocks’ (World Bank, 2020d: 50), with the status of government resigned to handmaiden for ‘private sector solutions’ in conflict-affected situations (World Bank, 2020d: 52).

The Bank is vague as to what its concrete policies are in conflict-affected situations to engender its vision of governance. However, more contemporary documents identify that ‘what this entails is ‘flexible’ at the country level’ (World Bank, 2021d: 5). This accords with the variegated manner of neoliberalism, where governmentality is inherently unstable and often messily applied (Brenner, Peck and Theodore, 2010: 201). What is certain is that rather than the state acting as a vehicle for democracy, development or political realization, the Bank’s idea of governance emphasizes that the state is just another institution that guarantees ‘the security and profitability of private business’ (Pereira, 2016: 819). Arguably, the World Bank has framed the state this way to radically circumscribe the ‘political’ arenas off-limits to it on account of its mandate (Pereira, 2016).

The state’s dual role of crisis-aversion and protecting private capital accumulation in conflict is evinced with the Housing Utilities Subsidy (HUS) programme in Ukraine, designed by the World Bank. The original aim of this programme, launched in 2014 after the war in Donbas began, was to support Ukraine’s poorest citizens cover their utility bills, as the cost of gas became quickly unaffordable due to conditionalities attached to IFI loans (Dolan-Evans, 2021). However, the material inadequacy and poor coverage of the HUS is typical of ‘social protection programs [built] in line with state capacities’ under the mantra of Bank governance rhetoric and practice (World Bank, 2020d: 36).

Fieldwork highlighted the inadequacy of the HUS. As of 2018, the average HUS subsidy was 149.6UAH/month (US$5.50) (Onyshchenko, Zavora, and Filonych, 2018: 133), far below winter utility prices identified by vulnerable interviewees. One internally displaced person (IDP) estimated that ‘if you have two rooms [the gas bill] will be 1,200UAH or more’ (US$43) (Interview 1), and a group of IDP women approximated gas expenses to be between 1,200 and 2,200UAH/month (US$43-78.7) (Interview 2). Gas prices have only increased since the complete liberalization of the gas market, catalysed by the IMF (2020: 15), as Ukrainian households spend approximately 11% of net income on energy costs (Alberini and Umapathi, 2021: 19). According to the World Bank’s own estimates, over one-third of Ukrainian households are ‘fuel poor, even [with] the HUS’ (Alberini and Umapathi, 2021: 20).

The poor coverage of the HUS also emphasizes the diminished capacities of the Ukrainian state to provide social support. By December 2018, only 3.9 million households had access to the subsidy (SSSU, 2019: 2). This is despite nearly 9.45 million households meeting the qualification threshold, up from 7.5 million in 2015 (Pirani, 2017: 10). Indeed, the poor targeting of the programme has been criticized by the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (2016a: 8); and, by the World Bank’s own estimates, over half of Ukraine’s poorest do not receive the HUS (World Bank, 2016b: 15). In the context of unaffordable gas costs, widespread poverty and active conflict, the HUS programme, an exemplary of Bank-assisted ‘governance’ efforts, has been unable to relieve citizens of material deprivation and ensure warmth and gas-mediated household activities during freezing winters. Despite this, the Bank has pressured Ukraine to wither down this programme, reducing ‘HUS costs . . . from 2.15% in 2017 to under 1% of GDP in 2020’ (Alberini and Umapathi 2021: 26), while, concurrently, IFI-influenced privatization of gas infrastructure has allowed oligarchs and private gas traders to profit (Yurchenko, 2018).

The war in Donbas has created a desperate humanitarian situation in Ukraine, with 69% of Ukrainians currently experiencing material deprivation (Goncharuk and Cirella, 2020: 589). Despite this, the Bank (2011b: 103, 257) has made clear that any state activity must avoid distorting private sector activities and only serve to restore confidence in governance. The case of Ukraine’s HUS emphasizes the limited role for the state in welfare, no matter how dire the need (World Bank, 2020d: 17). The connection between the Bank’s conception of governance and the private sector is central to both Pathways for Peace and Strategy 2020–2025 and is elaborated further below, alongside an investigation of how the Bank deepens techniques of neoliberal governmentality from the state and onto the individual.

Investing in human capital, banking on resilience

The World Bank (2020d: x) places ‘investing in human capital’ at the top of all priority issues in violent conflict, and Strategy 2020–2025 is replete with the phrase. Elsewhere, the Bank states it uses a ‘human capital lens’ to account for conflict-affected people and how they can contribute to their ‘countries’ economic performance’ (Corral et al., 2020: 33–48). Historically, ‘human capital’ briefly appeared in Adam Smith’s writings, where it referred to acquired and useful abilities of individuals (Adamson, 2009). The concept was inconspicuous until popularized by neoliberal economists such as Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz from the 1950s (Feher, 2009), where human capital was mainly conceptualized as concerning ‘activities that influence future monetary and psychic income by increasing the resources in people’ (Becker, 1993: 11). The World Bank was an early promoter of human capital in the 1960s, reorientating development away from improving livelihoods for recipients, toward emphasizing the capacity of recipients to create their own wealth (Calkin, 2018: 47).

A human capital approach has remained popular in development thinking at the World Bank (Best, 2013), and Strategy 2020–2025 represents a foundational attempt to integrate the concept into conflict-affected situations. This approach accounts for a conflict-affected populace in two dimensions. First, as potential entrepreneurs who, in a Foucauldian homo œconomicus sense (Foucault, 2008: 226, 270–271), are instruments of economic growth (World Bank, 2020d: 31). People are not only money-earners who can contribute to economic growth as Becker (1993) argued but are themselves an entrepreneurial ‘firm’ (Brown, 2015: 34; Foucault, 2008: 175). They are not liberal, Kantian individuals who are ends in themselves (Brown, 2015: 37–38), with a separation between reproduction and production activities, because every action appreciates/depreciates their capital, so that health, education and culture are opportunities for self-valorization (Feher, 2009: 30, 33), and an invitation for future speculation (Konings, 2018: 112). Thus, the World Bank (2020d: 35) highlights the need ‘to improve the delivery of health, education, and nutrition services’ for the purposes of human capital formation. However, instead of the state or any other collective social form providing such services for people affected by war, the Bank (2020d: 36) calls on households themselves to ‘invest in health, education, and nutrition’.

The Bank’s conception of conflict-affected people as entrepreneurs who, as homo œconomicus, look to appreciate their assets while furthering economic growth, has practical implications. In Ukraine, due to the retreat of the state and hollowing out of social services that accompanies the ‘good governance’ imperative (Yurchenko, 2018: 25), the private sector is tasked with ‘tutoring’ conflict-affected citizens’ human capital formation through employment in ‘value-chain programs’ and ‘labor migration’ (World Bank, 2011b: 256). As such, Ukrainian workers have been increasingly integrated into global value chains for apparel brands seeking a ‘Made in Europe’ designation. These workers receive a paltry income and experience poor conditions that ensures ‘working in the garment industry is a guarantee of being extremely poor’ (Musiolek et al., 2020: 12), where such conditions have been determined by IFI pressure. At the beginning of the war in Donbas, the Ukrainian government froze the minimum wage and other social payments on the back of IFI lobbying (World Bank, 2015a: 2), only increasing alongside inflation from 2017 (Interview 3), directly impacting factory garment workers who are often paid at the minimum wage. Further, the IFIs have supported the Ukrainian government to institute regressive changes to labour laws that reduce trade union and worker rights, violate several EU directives and International Labour Organization conventions, and seek to legalize illegal practices within apparel factories (Musiolek et al., 2020: 13). Concurrently, the World Bank (2006) has highlighted the benefit of Ukrainian emigration and associated remittances for state economic development and growth. This is despite the harsh conditions of work for Ukrainians who emigrate, primarily women to Europe who perform care labour, and the severe gender violence and psychological impacts that often result (Tolstokorova, 2018). The World Bank (2020b: 17) argues for ‘good jobs’ to be central to human capital formation but defines ‘good jobs’ as anything that is salaried or waged (2020b: 30n), ignoring the deleterious impacts of exploitative working conditions, harmful labour environments and any concept of subjectivity outside of homo œconomicus. As such, when the Bank (2020d: 24) argues it ‘focus[es] on protecting the human capital of vulnerable groups’, this should be read that their potential contribution to capital is protected, not the people themselves; in a Marxist dystopian sense, the most vulnerable in conflict are preserved as cattle for the vampiric feeding of capital.

The second manner by which the World Bank accounts for a conflict-affected populace are as entities that are ‘resilient’ and withstand violence upon them, from either the conflict, environmental degradation or retreat of the state (World Bank, 2020d: 31-34). Both ‘investing in people and their human capital’ and ‘building community preparedness and resilience’ are two areas of ‘special emphasis’ in the Bank’s engagement in conflict (World Bank, 2020d: 34; emphasis added). There has been a growing traction of ‘resilience’ in Bank discourse, mirroring broader mainstream rhetoric that exalts a ‘thriving under pressure’ (Konings, 2018: 125). The concept of resilience in peacebuilding formally emerged in the Bank’s 2011 World Development Report and has been curated further in Strategy 2020–2025. Resilience for conflict-affected people is necessary to help them be prepared for, and recover quickly from, various disasters (World Bank, 2020d: 34). Pro-resilience interventions extol the vulnerable to self-invest in their human capital to withstand crisis (Best, 2013: 110), practically offloading ‘risk onto individuals who . . . can expect less support from public institutions’ (Calkin, 2018: 65). The protection and development of human capital is seen as the fundamental basis of constructing ‘resilience’ (World Bank, 2020d: 31), and particularly the human capital of erstwhile excluded groups, specifically women.

Women are seen as an untapped resource for resilience and, more importantly, economic growth (World Bank, 2020d: 19). This is based not only on women’s hitherto hidden status in development paradigms, representing an unexploited resource for growth, but also the human capital formulation’s focus on speculative futurity; women not only represent economic potential in themselves, but biologically reproduce future human capital(s) (i.e. people) (Calkin, 2018: 115, 119). As such, women are reimagined in the Bank’s human capital lens as ‘femina economica’, who are ‘simultaneously self-seeking in the labour force but altruistic at home’ (Coburn, 2019: 769), contributing to growth as cheap labour while providing free social reproduction labour.

The concept of ‘resilience’ intermeshed with the Bank’s ‘gender focus’, means that women are expected not only to be a source of economic growth in conflict, but also to carry the burden of coping and surviving in capitalist-induced crises, conveniently dissolving responsibility for the state and IFIs (Kastner, 2020). The Bank argues that women need to be ‘pushed’ into the labour market, own businesses and ‘become more involved’ in society generally (World Bank, 2020d: 19). This assumes that women are not already ‘productive’ or ‘involved’ in society, and in neither Pathways for Peace nor Strategy 2020–2025 are there plans to address the structural and societal barriers in capitalist, conflict-affected society that engender women’s exclusion (True and Hozić, 2020). By foregrounding instrumentalized notions of resilience and human capital, the IFIs ignore broader ‘conditions of people’s lives . . . [and] parts of the economy [that profit-making] relies upon’ such as care labour and nature (Cohn and Duncanson, 2020: 1218–1220). Rather, the IFIs privilege how their intercessions can integrate the conflict-affected state into the global capitalist economy, ‘with minimal barriers’ to profit-maximizing goals of private capital (Cohn and Duncanson, 2020: 1218).

The entrepreneurial, resilient, future-orientated homo œconomicus appears in Bank discourse as the missing ‘subject’ that connects a virtuous cycle of peace. The World Bank, reflecting assumptions of a teleological liberal peace, believes that economic growth directly assists the poor and contributes to a decrease in violent conflict, which, in turn, virtuously provides further opportunities for growth (Corral et al., 2020: 28; World Bank, 2020b: 17, 22). The conflict-affected subject in this cycle does not passively receive the benefits of growth as such, departing from the ‘trickle-down’ ideology of the Washington Consensus, but actively contributes to economic growth and receives tutelage from market-orientated institutions. Addressing the classical liberal assumption of the ‘rational man’, the Bank acknowledges in Pathways for Peace that people do not always behave ‘rationally’ as economic models predict, ascribing this to a feminized notion of ignorance and ‘emotionality’ of people in conflict (UN and World Bank, 2018: 85). This means that the Bank tailors its interventions to develop institutions that will ‘tutor’ such subjects to behave in an economically rational manner (Chandler, 2010: 86, 89). This is the individualized, biopolitical dimension of the Bank’s rationality of neoliberal governance (Konings, 2018: 112). Social policies such as labour market restructuring, cash awards for certain behaviours and freezing of minimum wages aim to ‘[make] up people . . . [creating] new ways of being’ (Best, 2013: 122). Governing technologies, such as measures associated with ‘human capital’ and ‘resilience’ interventions, are biopolitical (Adamson, 2009: 274), and displace risks from the state onto conflict-affected individuals (Brenner, Peck and Theodore, 2010: 199), actively producing a subjectivity that seeks to individuate itself through speculative investment in its human capital (Feher, 2009: 30). As Brown (2015: 84) argues, homo œconomicus ‘is made, not born, and operates in a context replete with risk . . . and potentially violent changes’, and the Bank is ‘engaged in very intrusive interventions in the pursuit of the creation of . . . [this] subjectivity’ (Williams, 1999: 98).

The possibilities for those who believe: Banking on private capital

The ‘private sector’ is venerated to near Messianic proportions in both Pathways for Peace and Strategy 2020–2025. Coding these documents reveals private capital to have the greatest import to the Bank’s role in peacebuilding and is the glue connecting governance and human capital approaches. The Bank presents the role of private capital for peace in an ahistorical and teleological manner, sermonizing that the private sector has been ‘an integral part of society for millennia [that] play[s] an important role in shaping peaceful pathways’ that, ‘in addition to their role as mediators and promoters of economic stability . . . often adopt conflict-sensitive business practices’ (UN and World Bank, 2018: 90, 196). This reflects the continuity of World Bank (1997: 1) rhetoric around the divinity of private capital since the 1980s, in an era where, allegedly, ‘the private sector . . . achieve[d] miracles in adapting to the demands of a globalizing world economy’.

The paradigmatic shift to the centrality of privatization and private capital in Bank development thinking can be traced to the 1981 Berg Report (Bayliss and Van Waeyenberge, 2018: 578), and has become almost common sense within mainstream development theory and practice since the GFC (Martens, 2020). In the context of charting the new Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, the IFIs, led by the World Bank, produced the document From Billions to Trillions (World Bank et al., 2015) which pivoted toward private capital as best placed to finance development (Alami, Dixon and Mawdsley, 2021). In conjunction with the rise of good governance discourse, the increasing veneration of private capital in development concretized the state as merely a promotor and supervisor of capital, as the Bank sought to explicitly ‘professionalize and depoliticize [the] state’ (Alami, Dixon and Mawdsley, 2021: 1295, 1311). Both Pathways for Peace and Strategy 2020–2025 represent an ascension for private capital, from its hegemony in development to peacebuilding, and the World Bank places unquestionable faith in the private sector to guarantee peace. The Bank (2020d: 20, 23) posits that ‘the private sector has an instrumental role to play in addressing the risk of violent conflicts’, which creates ‘economic opportunities [that] can pave the way for growth and contribute to peace’. Gallingly, the UN and World Bank (2018: 195) even present revelations that in South Africa, ‘a movement led by business leaders facilitated the country’s transition from the apartheid era to a multiracial state’, ignoring the primacy of radical, anti-capitalist and militant struggle against white supremacy.

In Pathways for Peace (UN and World Bank 2018: 90, 195), the private sector is uncritically presented as providing ‘jobs, services, and tax revenue, as well as public goods such as infrastructure and enhanced environmental and governance standards’, and whose activity ‘cuts across all socioeconomic strata’. This builds on the World Bank’s historical emphasis on the undisputed role of private capital in job creation (World Bank, 2011b: 17, 157), where the Bank has also unquestionably supported privatization of state assets for revenue gain and increased ‘productivity’ in peacebuilding (World Bank, 2011b: 168). As such, ‘growing private sector solutions’ is one of four ‘Guiding Principles’ in the World Bank’s strategy for engagement in conflict-affected scenarios (World Bank, 2020d: 16). Indeed, in 2017, the IDA introduced the ‘Private Sector Window’ to ‘mobilize commercial finance’ (World Bank, 2017b: 6), allowing aid money ‘to subsidise private-sector projects . . . in low-income countries and fragile and conflict-affected states’ (Ghosh and Sial, 2021).

The World Bank emphasizes ensuring ‘inclusivity’ for private capital in conflict-affected environments (Haddad, 2016: 35), where its ‘overarching objective is to create functioning markets’ (World Bank, 2020d: 20, 50), permitting private capital accumulation that is guaranteed by public money. Building on the importance of neoliberal institutions à la ‘good governance’, the World Bank (2020d: 19) emphasizes ‘institutions that can strengthen the rule of law, and those that can improve the business environment’. As such, the Bank tasks the state with developing infrastructure and services – not for the people affected by conflict, but to ensure that the private sector has ‘a strong enabling environment’ (UN and World Bank, 2018: 288), through leveraging public money (World Bank, 2020d: 20). The Bank seeks to construct a new private dispensation in conflict-affected environments, ‘de-risking’ the violent milieu for private investments by offering insurance (UN and World Bank, 2018: 287; World Bank, 2020d: 11). Employing the help of the conflict-affected state, the Bank not only protects private capital, but cuts ‘red tape’ and simplifies regulation to build a ‘business-friendly environment’ (World Bank, 2011b: 19, 157, 256; 2020d: 29). Practically, the World Bank promotes enclave investments for extractive industries and special economic zones (World Bank, 2020d: 29), which avoid tax and labour regulations.

A 2014 independent evaluation, commissioned by the World Bank, critiqued much of the Bank’s early work in conflict-affected states, chastising the institution for its unfounded assumptions of private capital, the saviour and redeemer within its proclamations. The report identified the highly profitable nature of the primarily extractive industries that the Bank assisted in conflict-affected states, and highlighted that such private accumulation did not contribute positively in terms of taxes nor jobs created (World Bank, 2014: 39, 52, 82). The evaluators accused the Bank of not ensuring that the gross benefits private capital received ‘spilled over’ into the economy more broadly (World Bank, 2014: 94), and that it ‘paid more attention to legislation and regulatory reform and less attention to the distribution of benefits and local economic development’ (World Bank, 2014: xx). Broadly, the literature on the benefit of the private sector for development goals is at best, mixed (Bayliss and Van Waeyenberge, 2018: 583–585). A 2021 World Bank-commissioned independent evaluation also found no positive developmental impacts of the IDA’s Private Sector Window (World Bank, 2021c: 27), though it is increasingly deployed in violent environments (World Bank, 2021b: 2–3).

The adulation of private capital in these documents has translated into material impacts during the war in Donbas. The World Bank has led the creation of a ‘land market’ primarily for the benefit of private capital in Ukraine. Soviet-era collective farms were dismantled in the early 2000s, with land parcels allotted to Ukrainian citizens for private ownership (Zinchuk et al., 2017: 60). However, as explained by an agroeconomist, most land shares were owned by villagers who were either elderly, single women or both (Interview 4). Because these recipients had no working capital, equipment or capacity for independent farming, they had to rent out their land cheaply, emphasized by the chief of a former collective farm (Interview 5; see Nizalov et al., 2015). This allowed huge agricultural companies to consolidate land through a myriad of lease agreements (Zinchuk et al., 2017: 67–68). Agroholdings received financial assistance from the IFIs, predominantly the World Bank (Plank, 2013: 200), allowing them to increase monocrop exports from Ukraine to the EU and further dominate the agricultural landscape. At the height of conflict in the war in Donbas, the top 132 agribusinesses held 5.6 million hectares of agricultural land (Zinchuk et al., 2017: 69).

The World Bank’s approach to land reform during war in Ukraine, which began in the 1990s, has been the continuation of ‘business as usual without adaptation’ (World Bank, 2014: 96). The privileging of private capital in Ukrainian agricultural reform has destroyed collective farms, their support structures and the communities built around them, allowing agroholdings to control vast swathes of land for the production of monocrop export commodities. Agroholdings have also catalysed an unemployment crisis, as they require a very small labour force (Zinchuk et al., 2017: 73), they reorientated the Ukrainian agricultural sector toward export-production, which has drastically increased food prices during the war (REACH, 2018), as well as degrading soil fertility and poisoning the water supply in the conflict zone, due to agricultural run-off from pervasive monocropping of industrial crops (Zinchuk et al., 2017: 68). The World Bank only evinces concern about ‘land grabbing by the state’ rather than by private capital (UN and World Bank, 2018: 149), with the latter directly encouraged. Rather than the assertion that land titling reform ‘make[s] land available to the people working it’ (UN and World Bank, 2018: 150), Ukrainian land reform has dispossessed rural people from their land in favour of land accumulation by agroholdings.

The World Bank thus privileges private capital in a Messianic fashion during conflict, despite ample evidence that there are minimal ‘trickle-down’ benefits (World Bank, 2014: 94). The Bank (2020d: 18, 35) has also cavalierly dismissed perceptions that private sector development is connected to elite capture and corruption, though contemporary and historical evidence demonstrates this to be the case. While venerating private capital, the Bank has directly rejected redistributive economic policies in conflict because, in the Bank’s words, they are ‘always a contentious process . . . [that] necessarily creates winners and losers’ (UN and World Bank, 2018: 215); seemingly ignoring the millions of Ukrainians who are evidently ‘losers’ from unfettered private capital accumulation during war. In the Donbas war, rather than demonstrate concern for the deterioration of human development for millions of conflict-affected Ukrainians, the Bank’s focus has seemingly been to increase Ukraine’s ranking in the Ease of Doing Business Index, from 137^th place prior to the war, to 64^th as of 2020 (World Bank, 2020a). The continued emphasis by the Bank on private sector expansion in conflict throughout these documents is predicated on both the development of ‘human capital’ cattle and the whittling down of the state in the name of ‘good governance’, heralding the parthenogenesis of a new trinitarian doctrine.

Conclusion: Reckoning with peace

In Strategy 2020–2025, the World Bank (2020d: 34) argues that engaging in conflict-affected scenarios is ‘fundamentally different’ from settings of peace. The Bank (2011b: 8, 168) has emphasized that its interventions are ‘best-fit’ and that it avoids ‘one-size-fits-all solutions’. However, this rhetorically soothing balm is betrayed by the prominence of ‘supporting macroeconomic stability and debt sustainability’ across all pivotal Bank documents, which unquestionably requires the construction of neoliberal, market institutions (World Bank, 2011b; 2020c: 12; 2020d: 34). There may not be a ‘cookbook that prescribes recipes’, as the Bank (2011b: 16) asserts, but only one chef is permitted and the cake has already been baked; meaning that the recipe for reform is relatively flexible, but the overarching goal of ensuring a neoliberal market economy under the tutelage of the IFIs is indisputable. The Bank has, revealingly, flaunted the unique reform opportunities presented by a peri-conflict context, asserting that opposition is ‘in a weakened condition’ and early structural adjustments are ‘more feasible’ (Kreimer et al., 1998: 34). Indeed, the Bank deepened its reform agenda with the non-elected coalition of far-right and conservative parties that seized power in Ukraine in 2014, just prior to the war in Donbas (World Bank, 2017c: 2). Reflecting the aims the IFIs have pursued since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Bank still dictates ‘privatizing state-owned enterprises . . . and safeguarding macroeconomic stability to continue reducing inflation, interest rates, and public debt’ in Ukraine despite active conflict and, since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic (World Bank, 2021a: 31).

The World Bank argues for the existence of a virtuous peace cycle, whereby economic neoliberalization increases growth, which provides economic opportunities for the poor, and fosters peace (Corral et al., 2020: 28; UN and World Bank, 2018: 53). In the maintenance of such assumptions, the Bank expresses befuddlement in evidently contradicting realities. First, the Bank is perplexed as to how popular grievances and conflict exploded across the Middle East and North Africa in the early 2000s, even though many of the affected countries had ‘sustained high growth’ (World Bank, 2011b: 1). Second, the Bank notes that, since the 1980s, the labour share of income has been in constant decline, inequality has exploded globally and unemployment has remained high (UN and World Bank, 2018: 54), questioning the presumed association between neoliberalization and economic opportunities. The Bank attempts to work through these contradictions by, first, attributing exploding inequality to purely technological change (UN and World Bank, 2018: 54), mystifying the relations within the capitalist global economy behind these processes. Second, more gallingly, arguing that income and wealth inequality are inevitable and these material inequalities ‘do not directly affect violent conflict’ (UN and World Bank, 2018: 55, 110). Again, the Bank’s main concern here is with perceptions of inequality, which they believe may contribute to conflict, rather than the material inequality itself (UN and World Bank, 2018: 98; World Bank, 2020d: 35).

Following the above analysis, which has interrogated the World Bank’s strategy when engaging in conflict-affected scenarios, the question must be asked as to whether these interventions can ever hope to advance a positive, or even a feminist, peace? The contention here is that they cannot. The assumptions that are at the heart of the Bank’s approach, which promote neoliberal governance, human capital and private sector development, create further structural violence for conflict-affected populations, as illustrated in its contemporary intervention in the war in Donbas. For Ukraine, the question of Bank and IFI-led intervention during war has become more urgent as this article goes to print. Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine promises further economic and human violence, necessitating greater reconstruction needs, international aid and an urgent pathway toward substantial peace.

Finally, the World Bank’s approach to conflict-affected contexts can be situated within its broader programming toward crisis, whether concerning financial crashes, ecological disasters or balance-of-payment calamities. The etymology of crisis reveals the exigency of interrogating the Bank’s approach to crisis, inclusive of conflict. The English term is borrowed from the Ancient Greek noun, κρίσις, derived from the verb κρίνω, to judge or decide. Thus, distinctly implied in κρίσις – crisis – is the necessity to make a choice, following an event that catalyses such decisive urgency. What is evident from the analysis of World Bank texts that guide its interventions in conflict-affected situations, is that the Bank precludes the very possibility of choosing. The assumptions and foundations of IFI-led peacebuilding only permit a variegated neoliberal, ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein, 2007), with every other imagination or possibility debarred. Although the peri-conflict moment could be a window of opportunity for fairer structures, power relations and freedoms to develop (True, 2012: 190), such as through a feminist peace, the World Bank forecloses a future outside of exploitation and structural violence.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful comments on the manuscript, which catalysed substantive changes. The author would also like to thank Aisha Ismail for her careful review of multiple drafts of the article. Finally, thank you to Penny Vakalopoulos who helped the author with Greek etymology. The research project and associated fieldwork had approval through Monash University Human Ethics Research, Approval #2016-7344-7173.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author acknowledges financial support for this research, as part of his PhD thesis, from the Department of Foreign Affairs, Australia, under the project Towards Inclusive Peace: Mapping Gender Provisions of Peace Agreements (Project ID: LP160100085).

ORCID iD

Elliot Dolan-Evans

Notes

Elliot Dolan-Evans is Assistant Lecturer at Monash University’s Medical School. He has recently been awarded his PhD from Monash University, where he researched the gendered impacts of economic restructuring during war, focusing on Ukraine. His work is published in, among other journals, Review of International Political Economy, Conflict, Security & Development, the Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society and International Studies Review. Elliot’s research focuses on the political economy of economic restructuring during conflict, the work of the International Financial Institutions and questions of capitalism and health. Email: elliot.dolanevans@gmail.com

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