Inspiring People
Susan George
TNI obituary. Susan was one of the founders in 1973. https://www.tni.org/en/article/susan-george-obituary
Susan George - acclaimed political scientist and TNI’s honorary president – has passed away at the age of 91. “Study the rich and powerful, not the poor and powerless.” – Susan George, How the Other Half Dies, 1976
TNI 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.
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.
If you missed the webinar celebrating Susan George's life and legacy, it is now up on youtube here: https://youtu.be/8RNIV7UWA_Y. There should be a French version posted up later this week.
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Bob Thomson, a long-time friend of Susan and a supporter of the Journal of Fair Trade shared his tribute with Pauline Tiffen, JoFT Editor in Chief, and noted “thanks for introducing me to Susan and all that she brought to me and to the world.” Bob posts “From my work on a TNI evaluation in 2007, her visit to Montreal and Ottawa with us in 2011 and many visits in her Paris flat, Susan was not only a major influence in my life, but a warm friend and compañera to me and probably thousands of others in the struggle for a better world”.https://degrowthcanada.wordpress.com/2026/02/20/susan-george-acclaimed-political-scientist-and-tnis-honorary-president-has-passed-away-at-the-age-of-91/
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Desperately Missing Susan. Susan George was an educator, an agitator, and an activist who also authored more than a dozen books.
Walden's great tribute to Susan in Foreign Policy in Focus. By Walden Bello | July 2, 2026
Susan George passed away in February of this year. It is good to have waited this long for the movement to give her a proper send-off, for we have finally absorbed the shock of her departure and realized what a jewel we have lost.
What can one say about Susan George in 15 minutes? One can just scratch the surface of a truly multi-faceted life and personality. Only a biography will do her justice, and I hope one of her many admirers will do one soon.
But let me begin by saying that Susan wrote at least 15 books, all of them of great importance to the progressive movement, two of which definitely belong to the great books of political economy in the last half century, How the Other Half Dies and A Fate Worse than Debt.
In her work, Susan showed her thorough grasp of the dynamics of capitalism not by abstract theorizing but by showing how, in the concrete, they worked to wreak such devastating consequences on the lives of billions of people, especially on those in the Global South. She had a sure command of the analysis. She had a sure command of the numbers. And she had a sure command of the language, one marked by beauty, wit, and urgency.
This combination made her one of the most effective educators at a time that people were trying to make sense of the head-spinning changes that global capitalism was putting them through in the age of neoliberalism.