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Elliot Dolan-Evans, "Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine" (Bristol UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Hi, everyone. I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy. College Matters from the Chronicle. College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Check out College Matters wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the New Books Network
- [00:50]
B
hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Elliot Dolan Evans of about his book titled Making War Safe for the World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, published by Bristol University Press in 2025. Now, the idea of big international financial institutions like the World bank or the IMF being involved in countries after conflicts is pretty well known, I think at this point. I've certainly come across it a lot in my own research, but I admit I had kind of fallen into exactly the trap that this book helps us not fall into, which is assuming that these sorts of institutions mostly show up after the war or like towards the end of the war. Right? That's where we often think about them, maybe because of their origins after World War II. Who knows why we tend to think that this book helps us understand, though, that that is obviously part of what's going on, but only part, because there is pretty intensive involvement of these institutions during wars. Obviously the war in Ukraine is pretty active at this point, and this book helps us before and during what these institutions are doing so that we have a fuller picture of what these international financial institutions are up to. So clearly, lots of things for us to discuss. Elliot, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:16]
C
And thank you for having me too.
- [02:17]
B
Miranda, could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? I mean, is there anything further you want to tell us about the origins of this intervention that you're making?
- [02:29]
C
Yes, yeah, of course. So I'm a casual academic from Melbourne in Australia, and I primarily teach at the moment in law, but also do a bit of teaching in political economy as well. And the book and why I wrote this book stemmed mainly from my PhD research, I started my PhD thesis looking at or investigating the ability for women to participate in political peace processes in Ukraine. So I did field work in Ukraine, mainly investigating this particular question, finding out, you know, how women are involved in peace in Ukraine, and during that field work and speaking to an awful lot of people on the ground. One of the things that was really made really clear to me by my field work participants was that this idea of politically being involved in the peace process was almost laughable because of the political economy of Ukraine under war, which basically prevented women, who are my research participants, but also any kind of everyday person from being involved in peace, because there's so much imperatives to work and struggle through a whole range of different political economy factors. And I then traced that towards the economic reforms that major international financial institutions such as the World bank and the International Monetary Fund were implementing at that time. So I thought that was really interesting. Just like you mentioned in the introduction, Miranda, I think when I was reading the literature, there was a lot of analysis about the work of the World bank and the International Monetary Fund after conflict, once a formal peace agreement had been signed. However, I was in Ukraine during the war in Donbas for a couple of months at the end of 2018, and this was in the midst of war that there was these radical economic restructuring programs occurring. And I thought that was very curious, very odd, and very different for my understanding. And it also determined the ability for people to be involved in peace or even think about peace. So I thought it was worth further study. And so with this book, I wanted to hopefully shed some light on those processes. Identify, you know, why has the World bank and the International Monetary Fund, the world's biggest international financial institutions, started to work in active conflict? What's the history behind it? And then also what has been the impacts and consequences of that work?
- [05:09]
B
Got it. Okay. That's very helpful to understand kind of why those questions are important and of course also how they grew out of fieldwork. I think that's really often where interesting questions come was, you know, you go in and you actually talk to people and you go, oh, hang on a second. You know, there's something else going on here. So obviously this is a story that in many ways, as you've mentioned, is about Ukraine, the people that you were able to speak with there. But this is not just something where the World bank and IMF are kind of only involved in conflict when it's in Ukraine. Right. You talk about in the book that there's sort of a wider scope to understand here. So can you help us understand a bit of that in terms of how and why the World bank and IMF began, began to get involved in conflict or sort of near conflict states?
- [05:54]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, great question as well, because like I discussed in the book at length, this has been a process which, you know, I start in the book by tracing it from their origins after World War II and through to the present. And I make the argument that this has been a quite gradual transition since that time, which has certainly accelerated in recent years. And most of the interventions the World bank and the International Monetary Fund, or imf, as I'll keep referring to them here, have done in these questions of war and peace has been in the post conflict space. And this was only really possible on a large scale after the fall of the Berlin War, once the Cold War ended, where being engaged in peace building wasn't seen as so prohibitively political for some institutions such as the World bank and the IMF. And during the 1990s they got involved in these post kind of post conflict situations. And in the book I mention a few examples and go through them as brief vignettes like a look at El Salvador, Bosnia and Afghanistan and kind of track the slightly different approaches that the World bank and the IMF took to these three theaters of quasi post conflict situations. However, after that point, and this was also around the time of the global financial crisis in the early to mid 2000s. Well, especially prior to the global financial crisis, both the World bank and the IMF were almost irrelevant. After decades of criticism of their structural adjustment programs and the so called developing countries or so called Global south, there's a huge amount of critique against them and basically, you know, no one wanted to really take money from them because of the conditions that they applied on their loans. In the early 2000s, there was some resurgence in commodities trading which helped a lot of so called developing countries get more capital on global markets. So there was a real turn away from the IMF and the World bank and they were, they were really in danger of becoming irrelevant and they were only really saved by firstly the global financial crisis, which made them suddenly very irrelevant again as they had to kind of put out fires from across the world. But also they started to move into this area which we call global public goods. So these are things that generally everyone thinks they're good, everyone wants them, they think they should be spread around the world. And these are things like peace, you know, action against climate change and health, you know, these kind of these things which are referred to as Global public goods, which the World bank especially, but also the imf started to see that as like an opportunity area where they could possibly offer services, finance and capital knowledge as well to expand their operations because they hadn't got as much business in their traditional lending operations in the early 2000s. And, and so they started, and the focus of my book is on these questions around peace. They started to more purposely engage in not only post conflict states, but then slowly intervening in situations of active conflict. And we'll probably talk about this a little bit later on, but it was with the Sustainable development goals in 2015 where the World bank especially followed by the IMF, definitively pivoted to attempting to help, you know, help economies which were under conflict or in countries in active conflict, which is really different from before because, I mean, previously, and this is kind of going back a little bit after World War II and their articles of agreement, they have stipulations whereby they can't engage in, you know, overtly political areas. And often it was seen engaging in wartime economies was often overtly political because it was fundamentally changing the political economies of states at war. And so they avoided that. And through a lot of complex kind of legal changes, which I go into some detail about in the book, they gradually shifted the interpretation of these restrictions to allow them to intervene in these areas which were kind of seen as like the sovereign right of the state. And these are things like security, law, justice, all those things which are important to a fragile or conflict affected state. So overall, the move of these institutions to dealing with these situations of active conflict has been one that has evolved over time since their birth at the Bretton Woods Conference after World War II, or as World War II raged, but has certainly increased in intensity in the last couple of decades as the World bank and the IMF has tried to kind of diversify, diversify their specialities and focuses and even more so in recent years because they've had a lot of competition from other regional and financial development banks, especially ones coming from China, which have, you know, huge amounts of capital. So they are not the strongest anymore in just those straight out lending programs. They're trying to diversify and be involved in situations outside the scope of what would normally associate with an international financial institution. So you're right, it's absolutely not just about Ukraine. This is something that they are expanding in other situations around the world as well. But as we'll maybe talk about later, Ukraine was a really interesting case because it kind of when they started intervening in Ukraine during act of war, this was at the kind of transition point for the World bank and the IMF in more broadly orientating towards intervening in active conflict. And so Ukraine, you could argue it's kind of like a little bit of a case study or a test case for them in intervening in active war.
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B
This is really interesting to understand because it helps us kind of illuminate that confusion or that assumption that you and I both had kind of coming into this of like, wait a second, isn't that not what they're supposed to do? Right. But these sorts of changes, very much behind the scenes, help us understand how we've gotten to this point in terms of kind of conceptually what is allowed and sort of that, what the scope is then more broadly capable for these institutions to do. Of course, though, changing the rules on paper doesn't kind of automatically translate to things happening in practice. Right. So can you tell us more about what the actual process is, is for sort of how the World bank and IMF imagine engaging with these conflict affected countries? I mean, you talk about in the book the cascade approach, like how, you know, once they've sort of gotten this permission to do it, how do they envision actually going about it?
- [13:10]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, in terms of this, this idea around permission as well, it's also important to note that the World bank and the IMF did receive permission from the Security Council to be involved in not only Iraq, but Afghanistan in the early 2000s, which also helped kind of pave the way for this legitimacy in engaging in conflict affected areas. And just like I mentioned, the IMF and the World bank had slowly been undergoing these internal changes to be involved in these areas that were previously sacrosanct or the realm of the state through especially internal legal changes. But also the imperatives that came along with Sustainable Development Goals was also really crucial in 2015 when the Sustainable Development Goals were negotiated and I guess, you know, published, it was a big question at the time about, well, how are we going to actually fund this? And the World bank and the IMF headed a really important document at this time called and From Billions to Trillions, which is basically the argument that there is no way that public governments are going to be able to fund the Development Goals. And so we need to turn the billions that the global aid community maybe has been able to mobilize in the past into trillions to be able to actually address these Sustainable Development Goals. And the main focus of this, this From Billions to Trillions agenda was involving private capital. So saying, you know, public money is not going to cut it, we're going to have to go to business, you know, especially institutional, you know, institutional financiers who have done very well after the global financial crisis, like pension funds and so on and so forth, who have, you know, trillions of dollars under management. These are the sources that we are going to get development funding from. And so this was a really important development because I mean, anyone who has followed the World bank, the IMF over the history knows that they have certainly always had the, I guess, priorities and interests of private capital in mind. But this was really important where private capital is actually put as, or you know, private business was put as the main source of development funding, which was something which is relatively new. And importantly, just a couple of years after that, in 2017, the World bank released a document called Maximizing Finance for Development. And this kind of built more on these ideas of the from billions to trillions agenda and said that, look, we need to mobilize private capital and this is how we're going to do it. And in this document from 2017, Maximizing Finance for Development, this is where the World bank set out their approach to do so, which is called the cascade approach. And this, this approach, which I'll talk about in just a moment in terms of what it involves, is not something that's just specific to conflict affected countries per se. It is something that the World bank especially, and followed by the IMF as well, who kind of, you know, helps, helps them in this implementation, is something that has been rolled out into lots of different scenarios around the world. So this cascade approach is something that again, a lot of people would be relatively familiar with, but it did introduce some kind of new tactics by the World bank especially. So the cascade approach is basically a two pronged approach where the idea is that these kind of cascading reforms will spur change and create a positive impetus for development. And the first stream, which is called the upstream part of the cascade approach, it's upstream because it's focused at the policy level. This is all, all the kind of work that many of us would be familiar with. You know, watching the World bank over the last number of decades. It's a lot of their kind of structural adjustment programs. These are like policy focused approaches of, you know, increased marketization. You've got to make markets in land, energy, whatever it might be. It's increased privatization, it's allowing better movement of capital across borders, or all these kind of policies that can be implemented at the kind of governmental level
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B
which
- [17:46]
C
basically allows private capital to come into the developing country, the conflict affected country, whatever situation it might be. So this is stuff that again, very familiar to people who have observed the World Bank's work. But, but the interesting thing I thought was quite interesting was that the second prong of this approach, of the cascade approach is called the downstream reforms. And these are something which are relatively new tactics by the World bank and especially, you know, explicitly. So these are what I term in the book the de risking reforms, which is targeted at the project level where the World bank works either with the government or independently and, and works to ensure that the development or the conflict affected or you know, maybe climate ravaged context is suitable for private capital. So this might be things like, you know, guarantees, it might be public private partnerships, it might be subsidies for private business, all these kind of project level financing tools. And these are also, people might know them as tools around that are called blended finance. These kind of tools basically make the environment safe for private investment. And so this was something that was explicitly noted in that 2017 document and has been a major theme of the World bank and also the IMF going forward since that time. The IMF is usually tasked with doing a lot of the upstream stuff, you know, a lot of the policy work, while the, the World bank especially focuses on the downstream, the downstream reforms and often through its private arm of the International Finance Corporation. So this cascade approach has been something that's now been rolled out to conflict affected contexts. And we can talk about some of the examples of these reforms later. But this has been a really pivotal change in the World Bank's work.
- [19:55]
B
Yeah, that is a really big change. So thank you for taking us through it. And of course, as you mentioned, there's loads more detail in the book as well for anyone who wants to get further into that. But I would love to talk about kind of what that means in practice for Ukraine. So when the war broke out in 2014, what happened with this cascade approach for real people in this particular country?
- [20:19]
C
Yeah, and you know, as everyone will mostly know as well, the World bank and the IMF has had a really long relationship with Ukraine. So, you know, since the fall of the Soviet Union, the IMF and the World bank has been working in Ukraine. And when the, when the war broke out in 2014, these international financial institutions didn't actually treat Ukraine any differently at the time, which was also kind of interesting in and of itself because they treated Ukraine as just a continuation of the work they were doing otherwise. But you know, this time there was a large war breaking up out in the eastern part of the country in the Donbass. So it was quite controversial that they had firstly been intervening in that they continued to kind of work in Ukraine while violence kind of escalated and spiraled out of control, which was something that was very different to their previous actions. Like I said, this is one of the first cases where they consciously intervened and continued their work in active conflict. So that was controversial. And the fact that they treated it just as a usual situation is also controversial in and of itself as well. And you can see this in their documents and as they talk about the huge loans that they implemented in Ukraine at the time, the war barely has a mention. So their kind of initial approach in the war was to basically effectively ignore it for the first few years. And this was when they then started to develop some kind of internal processes, some internal strategies of dealing with war, like, you know, what are the policies that the World bank and the IMF are going to implement for their work in conflict? Because it was very risky, you know, incredibly risky. So there was all these internal changes. Again, you know, this is. It's a lot of detail. So the book just covers. Covers a lot of it. So this is, this is one of the things I argue in the book that Ukraine was actually a bit of a catalyst for the World bank and the IMF to start thinking about, well, how are we actually going to do our normal activities in a country under. In war. And as I talk about in the book, the World bank did initially start creating some internal policies, which then started slowly to be external facing. And then finally in 2020, the World bank released their first external strategy describing how they approach war. And the IMF released theirs in 2022 on the eve of the Russian invasion. But in terms of their actual work, this cascade approach, I mean, just very generally looked very similar in terms of the upstream stuff that they'd done in Ukraine for a long time. You know, they were pushing for land privatization, they were pushing for creating markets in energy, gas especially. They wanted to reduce social services, cut healthcare spending, education spending. All this kind of stuff that critics of the World bank, the IMF have pointed out for years, that is a part of their structural adjustment programs, which under the cascade approach is their upstream work. However, what was also interesting, which I found in my field work, was that under the radar, I mean, after a few years, once they started to get themselves a bit together in this kind of new violent context, this in Ukraine, they started implementing these de risking downstream reforms, a part of the cascade approach. So this was they started to directly support private business to, you know, subsidize their operations. They gave, you know, concessions and guarantees to foreign capital operating in Ukraine to kind of attract them over and ensure that they. That the risk profile for those companies was greatly reduced. And so in the book, I go into a lot of detail about that and especially around public private partnerships and infrastructure, which was also something that the Ukrainian government really wanted to build, which the World bank especially kind of created a very lucrative environment for private capital investors to buy into Ukrainian infrastructure. However, what the World bank and the IMF certainly don't speak about a lot in their documents is what's the impact of that for conflict affected people. And that's kind of the other major half of the book is, well, you know, all these things, these new things happening by the IMF and the World bank in conflict, there's all these vast changes. What does it actually mean for people's everyday living situation, which, you know, we can maybe talk about a little bit later. And I mean, this is obviously a big topic and a big question which eats up a few chapters in the book.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think it's probably best if we split it into a few different questions to kind of drill into some of these details. So I think first, if we could go to the agriculture sector and talk about what effects these interventions have had there.
- [25:24]
C
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'll try to keep these a little bit relatively brief as well, because I mentioned my background. I'm a lawyer by training, so I really like a lot of fine details. So if you really like combing through footnotes, I've got a lot of them going into huge details here. But I'll try to keep it kind of broad strokes. But the agricultural sector is really important for Ukraine. You know, Ukraine is seen as like the land basket of the Soviet Union. It is, you know, it's got like, really valuable black soil, huge agricultural tracks. So incredibly important sector. The interesting thing is, however, after the Soviet Union fell, there's actually been a moratorium on land sales since that time, so people couldn't effectively buy and sell land. You know, as I do document in the book, this, this is not strictly true. There was still exchange of land in quite significant numbers, but through a lot of very complex kind of legal loopholes that allowed that to happen. And, you know, even before the war, there was so much kind of exchange of land almost in this kind of a quasi black market, that it allowed these kind of huge agricultural corporations to kind of emerge in the Ukrainian landscape. And these are called agro holdings or are called agro holdings in the Ukrainian context. And even while this moratorium has been operational in the past, these companies grew really large and this had a lot of different impacts in and of itself. And I do touch on how the World bank and the IMF actually certainly supported their, the rise of these agro holdings and these huge agricultural corporations in the Ukrainian countryside, because this had a lot of impacts in terms of displacing rural Ukrainians from their land and having ecological, negative ecological impacts and lots of other things which I'll touch on in more detail in just a moment. However, with the war, there was then this kind of orientation to the European Union. So there's. There was an orientation away from Russia to the European Union. And the World bank worked explicitly to try to integrate the remaining small farm holdings in Ukraine into external value chains. So firstly, trying to supply the European Union or at least set up the channels to supply the European Union with agricultural products while also supplying, supporting these huge agricultings and as I discuss in the book, some of the agro holdings, these large corporations by this time as the war started breaking out and as you know, rural Ukrainians fled their land, especially in the east, which the Agra holdings are able to gobble up quite easily through different complex legal procedures. These Agra holdings were directly supported by the World bank, especially in the international financial corporations to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars to support their business. Um, and these companies were all focused on mostly, or I mean 99% on the cash crops growing, these, you know, crops for export like Sunflower, these kind of things which don't have any kind of relevance to, you know, Ukrainian food security. But overall there wasn't actually a lot of development, sorry, a development in the reform process per se. In the first few years there was a, There's a lot of political interests around land in Ukraine and it's very difficult for the World bank and the IMF to get any kind of traction for its cascade approach as it was developing this change though, as Zelenskyy came to power in 2019, as I, as I discuss in the book, there was then administration restructuring in the government which decreased the power of those who objected to broader land reform changes to kind of lay the foundations for a land market. And this was implemented during COVID lockdowns where there basically couldn't be any protest against it. They passed a law which removed this moratorium on land sales and allowed the market in land. So this was a key upstream demand by the World bank and the IMF which they had pressured Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian government for many years on. And when Zelenskyy came to power in his governing coalition, he had ministers who, who were very happy to, you know, accede to these demands, which are key parts of a lot of loan conditions from the World bank and the imf. Now, you know, this was problematic for a few reasons because the idea was that creating a land market would allow, you know, Ukrainian land to be bought and sold and would increase the price of, of the land. And therefore, you know, Ukrainians in rural areas will be able to get a fair value for their land. However, as I discuss in the book, because the country was under war, it was actually incredibly cheap to buy Ukrainian land. It was something was like a thousand US per hectare compared to the lowest at that time in the EU, which is the lowest you could find is around 4,000 US hectare in Croatia. And so land was pilfered on the cheap, which allowed AGRA holdings to expand even further, which was then also still directly supported by subsidies and very generous loans to Agra holdings from the International Financial Corporation of the World bank and other de risking project level actions that helped these huge agro holdings. And so I then discuss in the chapter that, well, the result of this has been this consolidation of these huge companies in the rural countryside. There's been a decrease in food security as pretty much all food production is orientated towards the EU and thus an increase in food prices. And so this has kind of left a lot of the rural countryside relatively destitute because there's no like, institutional support because these Accra holdings aren't really interested in, you know, maintaining rural towns and villages. So they've kind of disappeared. So there's been, you know, hundreds of Ukrainian villages have disappeared in the years during the war and not just because of the conflict, but because of these huge agro holdings which have also, you know, polluted the, the water and all and used huge amounts of fertilizer to be able to, you know, create these vast amounts of cash crops for export which is, you know, poisoned and exhausted the soil. So I go into a lot of detail about, you know, what has been the impacts in everyday lives of people in Ukraine and, and it's been, you know, one, especially in rural regions of, of hardship, expensive food, lack of job opportunities and mental health crises and burdens
- [32:16]
B
and all of that would be absolutely bad enough if that was the only sector of the economy that was impacted, but of course it's not. So can we add to all of that the impact of gas reform from these institutions on people in Ukraine.
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C
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, yeah, I don't, I don't just stop at one. There's three chapters which go into different reforms and, and they're all relatively bleak. So it's not always, you know, easy reading. And, and, and just like you said, Miranda, gas is the, is the next major reform that I investigate. And this, the, the gas program or I guess the Ukrainians gas system has been really again, a, a center point of World bank and IMF reform since the fall of the Soviet Union. It's also in the middle of geopolitical turmoil and has historically been between the EU and Russia. There's been numerous crises in gas because gas obviously gets transported from Russia to the EU through Ukraine. And so the transmission pipelines and even some nascent production ability of Ukraine in gas is exceptionally important in not only geopolitics and not only in the political economy of Ukraine, but also for gas supply to Europe, for example. And so the three kind of main goals that the IMF and the World bank have had in Ukraine during the war with regards to gas reform. And again, this was another area of reform that they really struggled to make any headway with before the war. And so is only with kind of the turmoil of the war and the kind of political opportunities that it opened up that it allowed reform to occur. And especially because Ukraine since 2014 has been in an ongoing economic crisis and is dependent on the IMF and the World bank for funding. So the first thing that the IMF and the World bank wanted to do was implement downstream measures at the project level, at the kind of like, level of like gas infrastructure and of the major gas company in Ukraine, which is called NAFTA Gas. They basically tried to break NAFTA Gas up, which is like a monopoly holding into small investable chunks. So they firstly made sure that NAFTA Gas, the sole gas provider in Ukraine, was a profitable company because before the war it wasn't for lots of various reasons. So they bolstered its profitability and they did this in a number of ways, which I'll talk about in a moment. They also encouraged the formation of competitor companies as well and then subdivided the gas network into small bankable projects which could then be sold, you know, to private investors into like, you know, divided into like distribution, storage, production, these kind of segmental parts of the network which then could be privatized, which could then. And the World bank of the IMAFINO supported the realization of these projects and effectively de risks them and created political insulation around them and so that the government couldn't effectively kind of block or create any problems through these privatizations and gas sales. And I go through a lot of detail in the book about these. Then the second kind of goal was the upstream integration of Ukraine into the European Union's energy policy suite alongside kind of a different, deeper exploitation of Ukrainian gas fields so that Ukraine could then be a net exporter to the eu, which is also really vital to move away from reliance on Russian gas. And in doing so, they also aim to kind of cordone off the energy sector from political influence in Ukraine because again, it was a very politicized sector in decades past, which, you know, oligarchs. And it had been kind of the plaything of oligarchs in Ukraine and a huge source of rent. And so a lot of the World bank and the imf, along with the European Union, instituted what I discussed in the book as constitutionalist measures, which basically took decision making around energy outside the hands of the government. And then the third major goal, which was really the most important for my chapter and animated the everyday impacts on people, was that previously to the war, gas was heavily subsidized for the Ukrainian population. So, you know, gas and energy was very cheap. However, as the war progressed, as I track in the book, the cost of gas to households has increased about 650%. So huge increase in gas prices at the household level. And this was the major goal to make NAFTA gas, or the sole gas provider, profitable. But it also also created huge immiseration, inequality and poverty in the Ukrainian population. It also meant that people tried not to use gas on the front lines of the war. People would go out and especially women would go out to find, you know, biofuels to burn in their house, to keep the house warm or to, or to cook food. However, there's, you know, huge amounts of landmines in rural areas near the conflict zone. And then once those biofuels were burned inside, this would create a lot of black particulate matter, which would then create a high incidence of respiratory disease. And so I kind of go into these everyday impacts of, well, what does it mean to so radically increase the price of gas to households while de risking the environment for private investors? What does this mean to people's everyday existence? And as I talk about in the book, it made it a very difficult and challenging one to survive, especially on the front lines of the war, when the entirety of your survival is orientated around obviously being able to cook food, but also to heat the home when you're faced with negative 30 degree conditions in the eastern parts of Ukraine, Fox
- [38:43]
A
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- [39:38]
B
Yeah, that one I think is in many ways the kind of easiest to understand in terms of direct day to day meal by meal impact kind of regardless of who one is or your gender or your age or anything like that. But to add to that further, as you said there are multiple chapters dealing with impacts. So let's throw in then the section where you discuss the pension system because that of course has particular impacts for age and interestingly gender too. So what's going on there?
- [40:09]
C
Yeah, and the pension was a really fascinating one. And again another area of reform which I hadn't planned on investigating before I went to Ukraine. It was only something that a lot of my field work interviewees brought up again and again and again. And the pension system in Ukraine had obviously come from that of the Soviet Union. And it was kind of like a, you know, a guaranteed payment once you finished work based on, you know, how many years of work that you did in the past. This was also one of the top targets for the IMF and the World bank to reform since the fall of the Soviet Union. However, they had a lot of difficulty in doing so because the pension is very popular because in Ukraine it was a relatively good way to be able to live independently before the war. However, since the the war occurred this was again something that was at the the top of the World bank and IMS wish list to change into a structure where it could be de risked for then private investment. And I do touch on the book at the time of when I was writing they hadn't really gotten to that stage but there was still a huge amount of changes that they had made to the pension system, some of which which were very surprising which will pave the way for significant privatization and de risking which is also really important because the pensions of Ukraine in terms of like, you know, cumulatively of the millions of people in Ukraine, their pension funds in total is a huge amount of potential institutional wealth which can then be invested, you know, and played with effectively on the stock market. So it represents a vast, you know, untapped fortune. But in terms of, well, you know, what did actually happen during the war to the pension system, the World bank and the imf more or less throughout the years of the war in Donbas changed it so that the pension was hard to access. You had to generally work more and the pension was generally smaller than it was. One of the really interesting mechanisms or processes that I saw in Ukraine during field work was that when the war started to really heat up at the end of 2014, in 2015, the Ukrainian government made a decision not to pay any social services in the areas that were captured by what, you know, most of the literature at that time had called pro Russian separatists. So in those areas controlled by these so called pro Russian separatists, the Ukrainian government stopped paying social services. And this prominently included pension because the pension is kind of the biggest social payment that Ukrainian government as well as any many governments around the world make. Now the impacts of this was that prior to this decision, there wasn't actually a huge amount of displacement from the eastern region in terms of the conflict. After this decision, hundreds of thousands of people effectively fled the pro Russian separatists held areas because these people couldn't access their predominantly pension anymore. So most of the people who were fleeing the war zone were pensioners and they had to make a decision. And I talk about this in some detail again in the book, that they either could at that stage go over to the Ukrainian government controlled areas, become internally displaced persons and then try to, you know, live there. They, they wouldn't that most of them had owned their house in the east. So they'd have to then, you know, rent a place, for example, or rely on their family to be able to stay with them. Or the other option that they could choose was to go back and forth. So they'd go to the Ukrainian side to collect their pensions, then they'd go back and live in, you know, the eastern Ukraine, eastern Ukrainian area that were under pro Russian separatist control. And then they'd go back again when they were due to collect their pension. This was obviously extremely dangerous and also expensive as well because they had to arrange transport to get through the very violent contact line. The temperatures, especially around winter were, you know, negative 20, negative 30 degrees. There was landmines, there was 40 fire from both sides. So it was an incredibly perilous journey for people who would go back and forth to collect their pensions. And these people also became heavily stigmatized in Ukraine because it was a reasonably well known phenomena that this was occurring. And they were called like separatist tourists or, you know, Russian tourists or something, you know, along these kind of lines. And they're kind of disparaged from, for doing so. And so, you know, after a little while of this happening, there was more processes that made this much harder, which then triggered a second wave of displacement where this kind of going back and forth between the conflict line to collect your pension was made more and more difficult. And so even more pensioners were displaced into the Ukrainian government control side. Now this had a lot of gendered impacts because the internally displaced persons, many of which were pensioners and also women and children as well, would often go into the households of extended family. And so this would increase their care labor of predominantly women in these families as well. Because also at the same time, even though these people were fleeing into the Ukrainian government controlled areas to be able to collect their pension and to be able to therefore be able to, you know, live at the same time the pension was being cut. So it was, it was becoming less and less valuable. You and you know, these people who now weren't in their own home, they had to rent something, which is usually impossible, or live with, you know, family, relatives they didn't actually have. Really the pension wasn't enough anymore to afford food. And so they had to rely on their extended families that they stayed with, which increased the social reproduction labor of the women of those families. And even in some World bank planning documents, even in government documents, they talk about women as being like this extra pillar of the pension system. Like they're very explicitly aware of this problem, that it's increasing a huge amount of labor for Ukrainian women in caring not only for pensioners, but also lots of other dependents, like people who are injured by war, children who are increasingly getting sick. So the amount of labor burden on Ukrainian women was quite extreme. And now how this, just very briefly to end, how this then links to the World bank and the IMF and their plans to privatise the pension and introduce de risking reforms into the pension system was that when the Ukrainian government stopped paying the pension, you know, for all these people in the Donbass, there was a huge amount of people who just, you know, stopped receiving it. And this allowed huge amounts of savings for the pension fund of Ukraine and basically allowed the pension system from come back from the brink of collapse to then be a profitable, you know, going enterprise which then could be privatized. And so there's a lot of arguably legal claims that pensioners would have to repayments by the pension fund of Ukraine after these payments being stopped. However, as I go about, talk about in the book at some length, the World bank and the IMF have kind of helped, you know, different accounting mechanisms to basically, you know, remove this debt more or less on the books of the pension fund of Ukraine. So it looks healthier for eventual privatization for foreign capital. So I guess that's kind of a short summary as best as I can.
- [47:59]
B
No, I think it definitely makes clear kind of what the impact of this is and how the sort of different policies are sort of all intertwined. Right. It's not as simple as kind of this policy has therefore this effect. It's like, well this then relates to this, then does this, right? And kind of all of that totals then for really quite a direct impact on multiple fronts. And as you've outlined, what then does this mean sort of going forward, whether it's for Ukraine or understanding these institutions? What are some of the key implications of all of this?
- [48:30]
C
Yeah, and this is what I try to bring together at the end and it's to, I think just, even just make the quite obvious point is that firstly I think, you know, scholars, activists, policymakers, whoever should, should look at this. You know, I think people should look at this and, and you know, previously the World bank and IMF kind of come in to maybe post conflict or in a development context and now in an active conflict context and it's kind of seen as like a, you know, gold standard. They're just going to do gold standard economic policies. They are just doing the kind of normal run of the mill things. And like I mentioned at the start, not many people in the literature have really questioned their activities in these contexts. And so I think one of the things that I want to do with the book is just to, just to make that a question that we should look at these programs under the microscope because it's not just pure economics. And this is also I'm trying to do with the book. It's not just looking at the abstract economic programs, but drill into, well, what's the everyday impact on people from these de risking reforms, you know, from these upstream restructurings at the national level, these downstream DE risking of projects and conflict affected areas? What is the everyday impact of people affected by conflict? Because that is not something that is adequately taken into account in the World bank or the IMF's programming documents in the projects and the loans that they implement. So this is the first implication of the book. And then the second implication of the book that I want to highlight here is that we should also question these, the point of these institutions in a way, like if they're de risking war for private capital, I mean, when it's having, as I kind of make the argument in the book, such a negative impact on people's ability to live on a day to day basis, is this something that these institutions should be doing? If these de risking reforms are creating so much inequality, immiseration, ecological damage and all these kind of things that I describe in some detail in the book, is that something that we should be satisfied with for these ostensibly public institutions? And I guess as a side implication of that, it's also questioning, well, these kind of new category of neoliberal reforms also appropriate in war. And that's an argument that I go into some detail in the book which I haven't really mentioned here. But it's about this new kind of new form of de risking neoliberalism. Is this something that is appropriate to the conflict context? And I think we can also ask that question more broadly. But I think they're probably the key implications I was trying to get through.
- [51:20]
B
I think that makes sense as a good place as well to conclude our discussion on the book with implications laid out. And I know you mentioned some of your teaching at the moment, but is there anything else you're currently working on that you want to give us a sneak preview of before I let you go?
- [51:35]
C
Yeah, I think, you know, I'm really interested in this question of global public goods in the international institutions. I'm starting to have a. Yeah, what are their work in other global public goods such as, you know, health, for example? I've got a real, real interest in health as well, as well as climate change. And even some of the smaller regional banks are starting to take this de risking approach, like the Asian Development bank in the Asian Pacific region and they're trying to, you know, de risk green finance. So they're this kind of, you know, the IMF and the World bank are these kind of paradigmatic institutions where once they start kind of, you know, changing their operations and setting new norms or ways of doing things, then you'll often see these practices kind of radiate, radiate out to others. So this is where I hope my research is going anyway.
- [52:24]
B
Well, that certainly sounds interesting. And of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Making War Safe for Capitalism, the World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, published by Bristol University Press in 2025. Elliot, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [52:40]
C
Thank you so much for having me, Miranda. I really appreciate.