In Memoriam: Susan George (1934–2026)

This curated playlist brings together Susan speaking at various events over the years. In these recordings, you can hear not only her incisive critique of global systems, but also her humor, warmth, and tireless belief that change is possible.

Her speeches remain profoundly relevant. They remind us that:

• Global injustice is not inevitable.
• Democracy requires vigilance and participation.
• Economic systems must serve people, not the other way around.
• Courageous analysis can fuel transformative action.

We have been deeply moved by the many messages received from friends, partners, colleagues and comrades across the world.

Below we share a selection of tributes. We will continue to update this page as further messages arrive.

Our friend and comrade Susan George has left us

We express our sorrow at her passing. She actively supported our entire association, of which she was a founding member in 1998 and remained honorary president.

From national and international bodies to local committees, she embodied and nurtured with her expertise the action-oriented popular education that has been the strength of our association. This was the spirit of her many books and countless lectures.

We also express our gratitude to an inspiring figure of anti-globalization and the weaver of a vast network. Politicized by her opposition to the Vietnam War and France’s welcome to American draft dodgers, her internationalist spirit never wavered. During those years of war and repression, she worked to bring an American think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies, to Europe, where it became the TNI, Transnational Institute, based in Amsterdam, of which she was president and honorary president.

After being commissioned to write a report for the FAO in 1974, she published her first book in 1976, which earned her international acclaim : How the Other Half Dies (Laffont, 1978). This marked the beginning of her fight against the multinationals that are starving the planet, against the perverse colonialism of the “debt” of the countries of the South and the role of international institutions in its creation.

In 2000, she published Le rapport Lugano (Fayard), a provocative work of “factual fiction” set in Lugano, Switzerland, featuring a group of experts gathered to save capitalism. It remains relevant today. Sensitive to ecological disruption, she was a member of the Board of Directors of Greenpeace International and Greenpeace France from 1989 and participated in the launch in France of an organization known in the United Kingdom, Extinction Rebellion.

Faced with neoliberalism, embodied by the dogma of the globalized market and free trade, and the excesses of finance, she was involved in all our struggles, from the blockade of the WTO in Seattle in 1999 the World Social Forums initiated in Porto Alegre in 2001, to the concrete organization, with local Attac committees, of national campaigns against free trade agreements (notably the GATS, General Agreement on Trade in Services), tax havens, and campaigns against GMOs and Monsanto.

We remember her determination, her availability, her elegance, and her humor, which was often devastating to her opponents. In these dark times, we hear her message : "Of course, I can feel discouraged at times. But I don’t think I’ve wasted my time. I believe that the effects of an action, and even more so of a series of actions, can occur at any time and often when you least expect it" (Je chemine avec Susan George, Seuil, 2020).

We at CEO are deeply saddened to learn that our staunch ally, source of inspiration, helpful comrade, and very dear friend Susan George, has died.

A sharp writer and author, Susan wrote passionately about social justice and democracy, from the publication of her first book How the Other Half Dies in 1976. She wrote book after book, all of which inspired thousands of people to act.

She was always so much more than a writer; she was an activist who helped create movements. She will be remembered as a key figure in the fight against the IMF and the World Bank in the 80s and 90s, and for her work for debt cancellation for the Global South. She was important to the Transnational Institute, and she will be remembered as one of the founders of the alter-globalisation movement, including for her role in establishing the ATTAC movement.

To us at CEO, she was not a distant star; she was a friend among us. Susan sat on our organisation’s board from the outset, and remained there for two decades, accompanying us through countless struggles and campaigns. Whether the subject was the WTO and global trade, lack of democracy in the EU, the euro crisis, or corporate power in all its shapes and forms, she was always sharp, perceptive, inspiring and helpful. A lot of our work has her fingerprints.

Some of the things she said about us made us blush. Such as this: “These researchers do what I have recommended ever since my first book: ‘study the rich and powerful, not the poor and powerless. The poor already know what is wrong with their lives and if you really want to help them, you should help them to understand the forces that keep them where they are.’” Needless to say, perhaps, that is a good description of her own work.

She was an invaluable voice. We are so grateful to Susan, for what she did for our shared causes, and who she was when she was with us in Brussels or elsewhere. We miss her.

Director | Global Social Justice

I am deeply saddened by the passing of Susan George — a loss that feels both personal and collective for all of us who believe in social justice. I first encountered her through A Fate Worse than Debt, while writing my master’s thesis on Latin America’s external debt. That book was an eye opener: it fundamentally shaped how we understand the structural nature of debt, power, and inequality. From that moment on, her work became a constant intellectual companion. Susan (who was not an economist) had the rare ability to make complex global economic realities morally and politically clear without ever simplifying their depth.

Across more than four decades, she stood among the most lucid and fearless critics of neoliberalism. In How the Other Half Dies, she exposed the political economy behind global hunger, demonstrating that famine and malnutrition were not inevitable tragedies but the result of policy choices. The Debt Boomerang revealed how the debt crisis imposed on the Global South would ultimately reverberate back into Northern economies and societies. With The Lugano Reports, written as an ironic and provocative thought experiment, as if a secret committee of elites had commissioned experts to save capitalism from its own contradictions, she dissected the internal logic of neoliberal globalization with unsettling precision, while Another World Is Possible If… offered a grounded and democratic vision of alternatives. I was then in Manila, so far from everything, and this was the first time that I wrote to her.

At a time when the World Bank and regional development banks were studying the poor — to pretend that something was done for them — she would wave this aside: “Ah, nonsense, you must study the rich and the powerful.” The world, she told me, was awash with money, carefully hidden, organized, and defended. That lesson stayed with me forever. Across her work, she relentlessly exposed how powerful vested interests shaped and manipulated economic rules to their own benefit, at immense social cost to ordinary people.

After the global financial crisis, she argued relentlessly that austerity policies forced societies to pay for crises created by banks — socializing losses while privatizing profits — producing deep cuts to social services, rising poverty, and widening inequality, ultimately advancing a conservative agenda aimed at dismantling the welfare state. She spoke with courage about how Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese citizens were turned into “laboratory rats” of an austerity experiment whose social consequences we are seeing today. She insisted that economic policy was never neutral, and that democracy itself was at stake when technocratic decisions overrode social rights.

Her institutional legacy is immense. A founding figure of ATTAC — the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions — and of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, where she built an intellectual home for independent and cutting-edge research to challenge social injustice and present democratic public alternatives to neoliberal globalization.

Susan was, paradoxically, a shy and deeply modest person. Her manners and appearance were almost conservative, yet she was a writer and speaker of enormous force and passion: she felt a responsibility to speak truth to power.

Even when extraordinarily busy, she continued to support those working on progressive causes, always generous with her time. On a personal level, Susan’s support meant a great deal to me. She praised and encouraged my work on austerity on multiple occasions, offering solidarity at difficult moments. I mourn her deeply.

A giant has fallen — but her sharp writings, her intellectual bravery, and her refusal to accept injustice will continue to inspire us.

Susan George and her “important and just” struggles

On February 14, 2026, at the age of 91, Susan George passed away. For decades, she was a leading intellectual figure of global justice movements, author of key books critical of neoliberalism, and honorary president of the Transnational Institute and Attac France. An American naturalized French citizen, Susan George began her activism against the French war in Algeria and the American war in Vietnam. In 1973, together with the Institute for Policy Studies of Washington, D.C., a think tank of the American left, she founded the Transnational Institute, based in Amsterdam, a meeting place for movements that continues to engage in cross-border campaigns. In 1974, she participated in the UN Conference on Hunger in Rome and two years later published her first book: How the Other Half Dies (1976). This started her work on the mechanisms of power at the root of global injustices in economics and politics. She went on denouncing Third World debt (A Fate Worse than Debt, 1988 and The Debt Boomerang, 1992), the World Bank (Faith and Credit, 1994), the rise of the World Trade Organization (Remettre l’OMC à sa place, 2001).

Always at the center of international initiatives, she participated in expert commissions and movement networks. Susan George played an important role in the years of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre and during the G8 in Genoa in 2001. She was a tireless organizer, a speaker at countless events, a frequent writer for Le Monde Diplomatique and the Italian daily Il Manifesto. Susan George — always elegant and graceful — easily combined activism and reflection; she was equally at ease in messy movement meetings as in formal debates with political opponents. Alongside criticisms, she offered proposals; for the global justice movements, she outlined alternative paths in Another World Is Possible If… (2003) and Whose Crisis, Whose Future? (2010).

As the Davos Economic Forum became the meeting place for global capitalism, Susan George wrote — mixing satire and dystopia — The Lugano Report (1999), followed by How To Win The Class War (2012), describing how the global elite planned to preserve capitalism in the 21st century and — as the French title suggests — ‘this time, do away with democracy’. She offered a disturbing and visionary insight into the transformations of power and the ways the rich and powerful operate.

Her commitment on the European front was also important, with intense activism and the book We the Peoples of Europe (2008). In the midst of protests against austerity and the Greek debt crisis, in June 2012 she was at the European Parliament in Brussels at the meeting “Another Way for Europe”. The session “A Democratic Europe” saw Susan George alongside Rossana Rossanda — a major figure of the Italian Left — offering insights from their political experiences and an agenda for recovering progressive politics to hundreds of representatives of European movements, unions, and campaigns.

In 2020, Je chemine avec Susan George (Seuil) was published in France, about her political and personal trajectory: "I am now an 86-year-old lady. I feel I have had the uncommon opportunity to do exactly what I wanted to do in life. I could engage in the struggles that seemed important and just to me." And she taught countless others how to recognize, understand, and participate in these struggles.

Here in Delhi on the evening of the 19th, my wife Pamela suddenly learnt from a Facebook post the deeply saddening news that Susan had just passed away. What made this so ironic was that at that very moment I was immersed in a 2026 book by Ann Pettifor, The Global Casino, that was explicitly dedicated to Susan George. It cited the author's deep indebtedness to Susan's two books in particular, namely Casino Capitalism (1986) and Mad Money (1998). Yes indeed, Susan's books will continue to inspire many who never had the luck or privilege to meet and know her in person.

I first became associated with TNI and Susan in the late 1980s but like so many others on the Indian left had already devoured her How the Other Half Dies. From then on, my admiration would continue to deepen but now coexisting with the development of a warm collective sense of fellowship with Susan and others when we could all joke, laugh, share stories and experiences, as well as argue fraternally over the best ways to address contemporary challenges. Susan helped steer TNI's concerns and activities in important new directions. Earlier than most, she recognised the growing urgency of taking up the ecological dimension in all its ramifications and the necessity of the Fellowship to begin familiarising itself with the writings and presentations of experts like Robert Goodland, Herman Daly, Larry Lohmann among others.

Many have remarked about Susan's insistence that to better help the poor, deprived and oppressed we have to study what the rich and powerful say, think and do. By doing so we are better able to speak truth to the powerless even more than speaking truth to power, since for the most part the powerful already know the truth but don't care! We of the TNI family were lucky to have Susan as mentor, ally and friend. Praful and I joined as Fellows together and before Praful's tragic demise in 2015, we would often refer to her as the guiding personification of TNI's enduring internationalism. May that spirit remain!

In salutation and with love,
Achin

I wanted to write a longer note in memory of and to express my gratitude to Susan George, who passed away on the 14th, for her role in the cycle of protests against neoliberal globalization.

I think we will remember her fondly as a comrade and a key figure with whom we were fortunate enough to share numerous battles in the movement for global justice: the fight against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank; the cancellation of the debt of the Global South; the Multilateral Agreement on Investment; the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)—which commodified and deepened the privatization of public services worldwide—; tax havens; GMOs; the Bolkestein Directive; the European Constitution; financialization; and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Thank you for every book, for every conversation, for every march we shared. Her legacy is indelible: her example lives on in the networks she built—TNI, Attac, Corporate Europe Observatory, and so many other organizations—and I hope that young people will take her work as a starting point for developing new strategies.

I hope I have done her justice. I have left many things unsaid. My apologies in advance.

Susan George has left us. One of the best political economists of our time, she came out with such classic books as How the Other Half Dies, which exposed how global capitalism creates hunger, and A Fate Worse than Debt, which is a modern classic. A good friend and colleague, she was someone so many of us looked up to and sought to emulate. I nominated her for the Right Livelihood Award (aka the Alternative Nobel Prize) in 2006. She not only deserved that prize but also the Nobel Prize for Economics, instead of many of the irrelevant neoclassical space cadets that regularly receive it. Susan, may you rest in peace. You will not be forgotten.

Susan was hired by IPS in 1973 to help set the groundwork for the establishment of our overseas branch, the Transnational Institute (it was part of IPS for its first quarter century). She went on to direct TNI. Her first book, How the Other Half Dies, came from one of the first grants to TNI. Part of the same grant went to Frances Moore Lappé and Joe Collins for the book Food First. Those two books became bestsellers and helped change the way the world thought about corporate power and poverty and development.

In the 1990s, we at IPS collaborated with Susan on her book The Debt Boomerang in a beautiful global team, exchanging insights and data and analysis on how the Third World debt crisis hurt workers and farmers and the environment in both South and North, and spurred migration from the South to the North. She had a gift for translating complex realities into beautiful prose.

She once told me that she thought up her best book titles in the shower. The rest of us benefited so much from those higher water bills.

A toast to Susan!

At Via Campesina, we often say that when our political and activist leaders leave us, they become seeds, because their ideas and actions inspire generations to come. Dear Susan, thank you so much for sharing so generously. You have inspired me greatly with your actions and have always been a leader in the fight against transnational corporations.

Susan George, presente! Presente! Presente!

For me, as a TNI Fellow back in the 70s and early 80s, Susan had a special presence. She was there, elegant, self-possessed, precise and deeply radical among scruffy theorists of revolution! She was ahead of all of us in understanding global inequality, the role of finance and climate change and, as John Cavanagh says, her writing "changed the way the world thought about poverty and development". An American who migrated to Paris, she radiated a contemptuous awareness of the irredeemable, cold-hearted wickedness of extractive finance and the so-called 'Washington Consensus'. Vindicated but never sorry for herself, she held the flag for global justice against the storm of neoliberalism and never lowered it.

Among her diverse roles for the Transnational Institute, her chairing of Board meetings stand out for me. She did so with humour, acuteness and pithy reminders of, among other things, what TNI should be about (“TNI should be true to its mission: studying the rich and powerful…” while rejecting politics that amount to mere slogans, or that help visit violence on civilian communities, and much more.) In writings such as How the Other Half Dies, The Lugano Report, and that superb research-essay of 1997, ‘How to Win the War of Ideas: Lessons from the Gramscian Right’, she re-framed the issues and left an inspired legacy that's sure to endure.

As a young student, I could listen to Susan at the European Social Forum in Florence. Not exaggerated to say, that talk was a true eye-opening moment and inspiration for me, which influenced my professional, political and personal choices after. Thank you so much, for inspiring and enlightening me and so many others.

Que tu viaje sea leve, y que espíritu seguirá en la lucha con nosotres!

Rest in power dearest Susan. You have been a great comrade and mentor. I have known you since the times when you were Chair of the International Board of Greenpeace International, when I had just read your books on debt. It must have been early 90s or so. And I was collaborating with Campagna Nord-Sud, a key actor on the Third World debt at that time. Then our roads crossed so many times. Always on the right side of history. You gave me the inspiration to contribute to the creation of the Campagna per la Riforma della Banca Mondiale, now re:common. I recall very well that day when you presented your book on the World Bank at the Rome Capitolium and you asked the audience whether anyone knew what the Italian ED in the WB Board was voting. Then shared the jury of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal session on European TNCs in Latin America, in Madrid. And we crossed roads again at the Transnational Institute. With a lot of friendly tenderness and admiration we used to hug each other. You will be missed.

Rest in power Susan George!

I met Susan when I was 25 at a TNI Fellows Meeting in Amsterdam in 1994. I was on a one-month visit in The Netherlands then organised by El Taller, a global initiative to train young activists from various countries. I was awed by her brilliance and inspired by her commitment to social justice.

I will forever be grateful that she always made herself available to speak at events I organised for the Institute for Popular Democracy, World Social Forum, Focus on the Global South, Asia Europe People's Meeting, ATTAC, Global Justice Now, etc. It was a privilege to have worked with her. She was very supportive when I built Focus' China Programme from scratch in 2005 and said it was a good time for nuanced analysis and effort to link with the then nascent Chinese independent NGOs.

She was always encouraging, made time to know what I was up to whenever I met her at TNI events and enjoyed dancing on Solidarity Nights. That last dance was in an ATTAC European Summer University in Toulouse. She will be greatly missed.

Deputy Executive Director, Third World Network
Vice President, Consumers Association of Penang
President, Sahabat Alam Malaysia [Friends of the Earth Malaysia]

I remember Susan whose book – How the Other Half Dies – moved me. She was invited to a conference organised by the Consumers Association of Penang (which is the mother organisation that led to the formation of Friends of the Earth Malaysia and the Third World Network) sometime in the early 1980s. I was a young student studying law then and attended the conference too and was happy to meet this great mind.

The leaders of CAP then were S.M. Idris and Martin Khor, who wanted Susan to come and share her views, along with other progressive voices, exposing the deep structural and unjust systems and rallying to fight the oppression.

She has contributed much for social justice and her legacy will live on through her writings and publications, which will continue to inspire many more to the cause for a better world, especially in these very trying times.

Rest in Peace Susan.

Remembering you,

Meena Raman

Chair of TNI Board

I feel deeply saddened by Susan’s loss, although there is some comfort in knowing that she passed away surrounded by her family, having lived an enviably rich, prolific, and fiercely principled life. I first met Susan – if memory serves me right – when she came together with Fiona Dove, the TNI Director, to visit Oxfam Novib, where I was working as a grantmaker and was TNI’s Programme Officer. Susan had an immediate presence and gravitas. Tall, handsome, and speaking in a dignified, thoughtful manner, she was striking and impressive. As a grantmaker, I tried to follow the advice she gave in one of her books: that progressive funders should not only support projects but see their mission as nurturing ideas that make an alternative, better world possible.

I met Susan again afterwards at the European Social Forum when it was held in Florence. I don’t recall the topic, but whatever she said, she said it very clearly, very compellingly, in that very profound manner of hers. It was impossible not to admire the human being Susan was. Impossible not to deeply respect her intellect and the passion she conveyed in her speech and writing.

I am proud to be associated with Susan through TNI, which celebrated fifty years of its existence recently. Together with my other colleagues on the TNI Board, we consider our service to be a homage to everything Susan represented and to her dreams of a world where there are no two halves: one who lives enjoying the abundance of the earth far, far beyond their needs, and the other half who dies, chasing after food, peace and dignity, exploited and victimized, its resistance policed and suppressed. Another world is possible, Susan said that; she lived and fought for that… we should continue walking on her path.

Susan was a light. An inspiration to the many of us who shared her concerns with humanity and the world we live in. She was always on point, with sharp and clear analysis, without being the least arrogant or inaccessible. Her reputation was built on committed scholarship and on speaking out to share her understanding of complex realities. In doing so she transcended her origins, one example of which was choosing to live in France rather than her native USA. I am so grateful to have had meaningful contact with her both when she attended fellows' meetings in Amsterdam as president of TNI and on her visits to South Africa, where she was celebrated and appreciated. Long live her progressive spirit and her work, which will always remain as a legacy and a provocation to all of us who loved her to follow her engaged and exemplary life.

A leader among those resisting injustice.

She made profound intellectual and organisational contributions to several generations of social movements. Among her many books, I remember how The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century left a deep mark on me. It is political education at another level.

I treasure my first years at TNI, when I had the privilege of working with her and Brid Brennan against the Troika (the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund). This photo is from that time.

The respect she commanded across progressive movements was remarkable. She was one of the sharpest voices explaining what was happening at any given moment — exposing the powers we were up against, and illuminating both what divided us and the urgency of setting aside differences to work together.

At the TNI offices, her words greet every visitor:

"Study the rich and powerful, not the poor and powerless... Let the poor study themselves. They already know what is wrong with their lives and if you truly want to help them, the best you can do is give them a clearer idea of how their oppressors are working now and can be expected to work in the future."

We will keep doing the work you envisioned, Susan.

Susan was enlightening and inspiring. Her scholarship was exceptional, as was her scholar-activism. I am deeply indebted to her and regard myself as truly fortunate to have known her over several decades. May she be at peace.

I remember interviewing Susan for New Scientist and a special edition of Science for People by the Agricapital group of BSSRS (British Society for Social Responsibility in Science). Our work is now available in the Welcome Foundation Collection (Euston Road), and here is Susan's interview online. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/awvngd6v/items?canvas=58