Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused humanitarian catastrophe and vast economic destruction. Ukraine has asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for emergency financing, the European Commission has pledged €1.2 billion to the besieged nation, and the World Bank has positioned itself as a key institution to address Ukraine’s economic and humanitarian fallout. In early March, within two weeks of Russia’s assault, the Bank approved a supplemental loan of ~US$489 million to Ukraine and set up a multi-donor trust fund to coordinate bilateral resources, which has mobilised millions. By June, the World Bank disbursed US$1.8 billion to Ukraine (made up of non-concessional IDA and IBRD loans, guaranteed by the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania and the UK). In early August, the World Bank announced another US$4.5 billion in financing for Ukraine via the USA, mainly for pension and social assistance expenditure.

The current prominence of the World Bank’s engagement in Ukraine must be situated in the institution’s broader effort to enhance its legitimacy as an actor during war. Not only has the Bank tripled its budget for disbursements to conflict-affected states since 2017 to US$18.7 billion, but it has announced its intention to be more intensely involved in conflict financing, with the publications Pathways for Peace, co-produced with the UN, and the World Bank Group Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence 2020–2025 (Strategy 2020–2025).

My latest piece in Security Dialogue, ‘Making War Safe for Capitalism’, critically analyses these Bank publications and the material impact of their interventions during the War in Donbas, which raged in eastern Ukraine from 2014 until the Russian invasion earlier this year. My article argues that the World Bank’s interventions into conflict, which rely on fundamentalist neoliberal assumptions, are antagonistic to the possibilities of peace. I argue that such interventions not only negatively impact the possibility of the cessation of major violence, known as a ‘negative peace’, but prohibit emancipatory, ‘positive’ forms of peace emerging, which promotes social justice and ends economic, social, physical, and other violence. As I explore through an investigation of the Bank’s foundational documents and their actions in Ukraine, the World Bank envisions its role as ensuring ‘good governance’, fostering the conditions for a blooming of ‘human capital’, and ‘crowding in’ private money during war […]