New Books in Military History · Marshall Poe

Elliot Dolan-Evans, "Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine" (Bristol UP, 2025)

·55 min·3 clips

Gas prices for Ukrainian households increased about 650 percent as reform made Nafta Gas profitable.

1. New Books in Military History discusses Elliot Dolan-Evans’s 2025 book Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine. 2. Miranda Melcher hosts the interview, and Elliot Dolan-Evans explains that he is a casual academic from Melbourne, Australia, who teaches law and political economy. 3. The episode asks why the World Bank and IMF began working in active conflict and what their interventions changed in Ukraine. 4. Dolan-Evans says the project grew out of PhD fieldwork on women’s participation in political peace processes in Ukraine. 5. He recalls that participants in Ukraine made peace participation sound “almost laughable” because war conditions pushed people toward work and survival. 6. He says he was in Ukraine during the war in Donbass at the end of 2018 and saw “radical economic restructuring programs” underway. 7. The book traces World Bank and IMF involvement from their post-World War II origins through the post-Cold War 1990s. 8. Dolan-Evans names El Salvador, Bosnia, and Afghanistan as examples of their post-conflict activity. 9. He says the Global Financial Crisis and the turn to “global public goods” helped revive the institutions after a period of irrelevance. 10. He identifies peace, climate action, and health as the public goods that expanded their agenda. 11. The 2015 Sustainable Development Goals created pressure to finance development at a much larger scale. 12. The World Bank’s “from billions to trillions” document argued that private capital, including pension funds, had to supply that scale. 13. The 2017 “maximizing finance for development” paper formalized the cascade approach. 14. The cascade’s upstream stream covers policy reforms such as marketization, privatization, and freer cross-border capital movement. 15. The downstream stream uses guarantees, subsidies, and public-private partnerships to “de-risk” projects for investors. 16. Dolan-Evans says the IMF usually handles much of the upstream policy work, while the World Bank and its International Finance Corporation focus on downstream de-risking. 17. In Ukraine, the institutions initially treated the 2014 war as a continuation of normal lending and barely mentioned the conflict in their documents. 18. He says Ukraine became a catalyst for internal war policies that later produced a World Bank external strategy in 2020 and an IMF strategy in 2022. 19. The interview is careful, detail-heavy, and policy-centered, with repeated explanations of legal and financial mechanisms. 20. Readers interested in Ukraine, international finance, and conflict economies will get the most from it.

As heard by us

A clear, measured look at how wartime finance reshaped Ukraine and the institutions behind it.

This episode follows Elliot Dolan-Evans as he traces how the World Bank and IMF have operated in Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union, and how the war that began in 2014 changed what that relationship meant.

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You want Ukraine, the World Bank, and the IMF connected through wartime lending, risk, and the way institutions kept working during conflict.

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