Susan George – acclaimed political scientist and TNI’s honorary president – has passed away at the age of 91

 

Reproduced from the Transnational Institute website.

"Study the rich and powerful, not the poor and powerless".

- Susan George, How the Other Half Dies, 1976

The Transnational Institute mourns the sad news of the passing of Susan George, on February 14, 2026. No one has done more to shape, energise, and inspire TNI over the decades – she has been our inspiration, our honorary leader, our intellectual soul, and our beloved friend. We will never see her like again.

Susan George exerted a rare form of intellectual influence. She was an independent scholar-activist whose work exposed the horrors of the global system and who relentlessly campaigned for progressive and just alternatives. With her departure, the struggle for a just, democratic, and sustainable world will miss one of its most passionate and capable warriors.

TNI joins the rest of the progressive world in mourning the passing of Susan George at the age of 91. She passed peacefully with her family around her. Susan was the President of TNI, an honorary position in recognition of her role in creating and sustaining TNI from its earliest days. She was also the President of ATTAC France. We have lost a peerless, incisive intellect, a visionary leader, and a caring pair of hands that fought ceaselessly for justice and equality.

Born Susan Vance Akers in June 1934 in Akron, Ohio(external link), she was the only child of Edith and Walter Akers. In 1956, she married Charles-Henry George and made France her permanent residence.

Many people will know Susan from the various hats she wore in a long and illustrious career. A political scientist? Yes. A social scientist? Yes. Development theorist? In a way. Activist, scholar, agent provocateur? Radical? Renegade? Perhaps all of the above. No label can encapsulate everything that Susan George was.

Throughout her life, Susan relentlessly fought for social and economic justice. In a career spanning decades, she wrote 17 books and countless essays and opinion pieces. She was a prominent organiser, thinker, and frequent public speaker on a wide array of themes. She acted as a consultant to several United Nations specialised agencies and served on multiple boards and committees. She was an antiwar activist and a staunch critic of corporate greed. She was many things, but in the celebratory sense of the phrase, Susan George was a Social Justice Warrior.

In her writings, she expressed a passionate anger at a global system that condemns hundreds of millions to lives of brute survival, and at the hypocrisies of those who benefit from that very state of affairs. Never capitulating to often vicious attacks from the establishment or being taken over by flattery from academia, Susan maintained a moral and intellectual rigour that only added to her towering intellectual stature.

Despite a relatively apolitical upbringing, Susan became a political activist in response to France's war in Algeria and U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1967, she joined the Paris-American Committee to Stop War (PACS), a group that was banned in 1968 and later forcibly dismantled by the French government in 1973. She collaborated with the directors of the Institute for Policy Studies(external link) in Washington, D.C., to form something new—something more transnational in character. She organised and hosted a dinner to bring key activists together, and eventually the Transnational Institute(external link) (TNI), an international fellowship of engaged scholar-activists, opened its doors in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, that same year. Susan later helped to organise TNI’s first conference, right after the coup in Chile, and she played a significant role in TNI’s early development. Susan remained closely involved with TNI for the rest of her life. Among many other roles, she was the institute’s permanent and only honorary president at the time of her death.

Susan’s core beliefs were formed and solidified during this early and exciting time at TNI. In 1974, she attended the World Food Conference (external link)in Rome, Italy. Her disillusionment with the process there, where she felt that corporate agribusiness representatives dominated the proceedings, led her to write her first book, published in 1976: How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger(external link). In it, she unflinchingly exposes the way in which capitalism destroys the lives of the poorest people on our planet. The book explains world poverty and hunger not as a terrible inevitability of human nature, but rather as something that flows from the logic of capitalism. She unpacks the political and social mechanisms by which wealthy countries keep poor countries hungry, and how the political elites of poorer countries are incorporated by the West to the detriment of the people they supposedly represent. She argued that technological ‘solutions’ in and of themselves, imposed with no regard for local economies and cultures, bring misery to those who are pushed aside by such developments—an early articulation of the importance of food sovereignty. She dismissed the myth of overpopulation, stating that ‘famine exists both in Bolivia, with five inhabitants per square kilometre, and in India, with 172—but there is no famine in Holland, where there are 326.’ Finally, she looked at the workings of large agribusiness corporations and the politics of food aid. Through all this, she systematically dismantled attempts by apologists for the system to explain away poverty as something unconnected with the normal workings of capitalism. Instead, she drew out the deliberate manner in which those in power cynically maintain and exacerbate the inequalities of the system to their benefit.

"The job of the responsible social scientist is first to uncover these forces [of wealth, power and control], to write about them clearly, without jargon… and finally… to take an advocacy position in favour of the disadvantaged, the underdogs, the victims of injustice." (Susan George)

The main concerns of 'How the Other Half Dies' prefigure the themes with which Susan would be consistently preoccupied for the rest of her life: the brutality and contradictions of capitalism, the negative impact of corporate greed, the capture of democratic institutions by oligarchs, and the ecological price we pay for continuing within the same economic system. Susan’s oeuvre of analytical writing mainly focused on challenging the power of those who have come to be known as the one per cent, or as she called them, the "Davos Class". These are the individuals so invested in the system as to fight tooth and nail to maintain it. She saw no need to postulate conspiracy theories; in her own words, "Why bother with conspiracies when the study of power and interests will do the job?" (Susan George, Whose Crisis, Whose Future? 2010)

In studying the rich and exposing the mechanisms of their influence all round the globe, Susan brought many ideas to the fore that are now taken almost for granted within progressive circles. The events of the ’90s, from the Philippines to Zimbabwe, bore out the warnings she loudly proclaimed in her book on the question of Third World debt, A Fate Worse Than Debt (1988), where she charted the effect of IMF and World Bank intervention and the ravages of the structural adjustment policies they imposed. In Faith and Credit: The World Bank's Secular Empire (1994), she shows how the World Bank undemocratically wields enormous political power and has succeeded in making its own view of development appear to be the norm, and her analysis of the power of transnational corporations in Shadow Sovereigns: How Global Corporations Are Seizing Power (2015) has only become more relevant as the role of oligarchs in global politics has come more and more to the fore.

As the world has awakened to the ravages of climate change, and citizens the world over come together to question the development paradigm of capitalism, it is difficult to fully understand just how ground-breaking, anti-establishment and pioneering Susan’s work was. It is no surprise that her stature as a thinker ahead of the curve only expanded right up to her death. Perhaps the most famous of Susan’s works is The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism (1999), and its sequel The Lugano Report 2: How to Win the Class War (2013). Both are ironic texts in which she writes as though she is the voice of a ‘working party’ commissioned by the governments of the advanced capitalist world to examine the question of what the main threats are to the capitalist system, and what measures must be taken to preserve capitalism in the next century. In placing herself in the shoes of the capitalist powers that be, she is better able to expose the cynical logic behind what are regularly seen as benign and objective policy decisions. If one reads nothing else from Susan George, one should at least read the Lugano Reports, if not for insight into the workings of capitalism, then for an initiation into the humour, wit and irony that were the hallmark of Susan’s writing.

Susan always defended an objective, honest look at the magnitude of the progressive task. As formidable as it might look, Susan believed that the system has cracks, and ‘we just have to get out there with our pickaxes and work along the fault lines.’

Even in the twilight of her life, Susan was never complacent. She was always open to sharing her ideas and maintained a rigorous schedule that belied her age. Susan’s husband, Charles-Henry George, died at their country home in France in 2002. She is survived by her three children—Valerie, Michel, and Stephanie—and her seven grandchildren.

"Either we achieve together a new level of human emancipation, and do so in a way that preserves the earth, or we shall leave behind us the worst future for our children that capitalism and nature can deal them. No one knows in which direction the balance will tip, nor does anyone know which actions, which writings, which alliances may achieve the critical mass that leads us one way or another, backwards or forwards. I am acutely conscious of the precariousness of our moment, and my much-loved grandchildren give me added resolve to address it." (Susan George)

Susan wielded the pen as her pickaxe and fought her battle to the last. May she rest knowing that here at TNI, a new generation has taken up the mantle, who will stand on her shoulders to achieve the far-off goal of universal human emancipation.

She will be dearly missed.

 Please see TNI’s Susan George page for a list of all the different positions and posts that Susan held in her illustrious career.

Sources:

• Susan George: Reflections with Kees Bierkart. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2007.00456.x(external link) 
• Mark O’Brien. In Perspective: Susan George. http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj86/obrien.htm(external link)
• http://arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/susan-george-hunger.pdf(external link)
• https://www.sociologylens.net/topics/political-economic-sociology/neoliberalism-consequences/10869(external link)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_George_(political_scientist)(external link)