ABSTRACT
The leading international financial institutions (IFIs) – the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank – are prohibited by their Articles of Agreement from any policies or actions that would ‘interfere in the political affairs of any member’. 1 Paragraph 10 of the Bank Articles specifies further, ‘Only economic considerations shall be relevant to their decisions, and these considerations shall be weighted impartially.’ Yet reforms of the political system, laws, and administrative practices of a state have been central to the conditions for membership, credits, and loans of both organizations since the 1970s, and the international focus on statebuilding in countries emerging from war can be said to have first begun with their policies for what the Bank began in 1995–96 to call ‘post-conflict reconstruction’.
