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Transnational Institute

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The Transnational Institute is a left-wing to far-left research and advocacy group located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, with a legal status equivalent that of a 501(c) nonprofit organization in the United States. Originally founded as an international branch of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) from 1973 to 1974, the Transnational Institute became independent in 1992, though the two groups continue to work closely together.

The original purpose of the Transnational Institute was to investigate and organize against alleged international “imperialism” across various contexts. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the institute focused on criticizing the role played by Western governments and multinational corporations in Third World trade and development. Susan George, who helped organize the original meeting that led to the Transnational Institute’s establishment, published How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger on the topic in 1976. As of 2023, George is the institute’s president, while its executive director since 1995 has been Fiona Dove.

In 1976, Transnational Institute director Orlando Letelier was assassinated in Washington, D.C. by operatives working on behalf of Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile. The following year, the institute sheltered Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) defector Philip Agee after he had been expelled from the United Kingdom. During the 1980s it was heavily involved in organizing activist and boycott campaigns against the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the institute was among the earliest critics of the World Trade Organization after its establishment in 1995.

Transnational Institute personnel generally advocate from a left-wing or far-left ideological position, with many influenced by Marxism. The institute is stridently opposed to global free-market capitalism and broadly supports extensive economic central planning. Material published by the institute also criticizes the international influence of the United States and Israel, including charging the latter with existing as an “apartheid regime” rooted in “extreme racism and colonialism.” 1

The Transnational Institute receives most of its funding from governmental sources, with the Dutch government alone providing over 40 percent of the institute’s revenue in 2021. 2 The philanthropic foundations and nonprofits of liberal American financier George Soros, including the Open Society Foundations, the Foundation to Promote Open Society, and the Open Society Policy Center, are also important sources of funding. Combined, they granted a total of $2,951,139 to the Transnational Institute from 2016-2021. 3

History

For more information on the Institute for Policy Studies, see the full profile here.

The Transnational Institute was established to serve as an international branch of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-wing think tank located in Washington, D.C. founded in 1963. While the Transnational Institute became independent of IPS in 1992, the two organizations continue to work closely together. 4

In October 1972, activist Susan George arranged a dinner in Paris for IPS co-founders Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, businessman and major IPS funder Samuel Rubin, and more than 20 other activists and thinkers. The attendees were united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. 5 Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes were among those in attendance. 6

Sources differ on whether the Transnational Institute was officially established in 1973 or 1974. In May 1973 IPS leadership approved a proposal to lease a building to serve as the Transnational Institute’s headquarters in Amsterdam from the Janss Foundation at the cost of $3,000 per year for five years. Historian Brian S. Mueller wrote in his 2021 book Democracy’s Think Tank: The Institute for Policy Studies and Progressive Foreign Policy that the Transnational Institute opened its doors on November 9, 1973. 7 The 1983 book First Harvest: The Institute for Policy Studies, 1963-83 also states that IPS started the Transnational Institute in 1973. 8 However, the Transnational Institute itself claims that it was founded in 1974, 9 the same year given by the editors of The Nation in 2013. 10 The IPS annual report for 1979-1980 states that the Transnational Institute was founded in 1974, 11 while the annual report for 1983 states that it was founded in 1973. 12 The institute was registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce on March 21, 1974. 13

Eqbal Ahmad was selected to serve as the Transnational Institute’s first director in 1973. An official history of the institute describes Ahmad as a “Pakistani journalist, professor, and dedicated revolutionary.” 14 He lived in North Africa during the early 1960s, where he actively supported the revolution against French colonial rule in Algeria. Later, he became a strident critic of the Vietnam War in the United States. 15 In 1971-1972, Ahmad was prosecuted in the United States on charges that he and six others had conspired to, among other things, kidnap then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. The prosecution of the “Harrisburg Seven” ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked on the charges. 16

Ahmad held radical views that were highly controversial. Historian Harvey Klehr wrote in 1988 that Ahmad had a long record of “virulently anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli remarks,” including having declared in 1969 that “Zionism is the product of Western racism, colonialism and imperialism—forces which are now represented by the United States of America.” 17

According to author Joshua Muravchik, in 1976 Ahmad wrote in the journal Race & Class that the communist governments of China, Cuba, and North Vietnam were “the forces of liberation.” 18 Ahmad remained the Transnational Institute’s director until 1975 and was a senior fellow at IPS until 1982. 19

For approximately the first 20 years of its existence, the Transnational Institute operated largely as a global association of “activist-scholars,” with a relatively small administrative support staff. 20 Soon after its founding, it began working closely with other left-wing groups including Counter Information Services (CIS), the Institute of Race Relations, and the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). 21

Purpose and Ideology

In its 1979-1980 annual report, IPS explained the Transnational Institute had been established after activists concluded that various alleged sociopolitical problems in the United States needed to be viewed and addressed within a global context. 22 The introduction to the 1983 book First Harvest stated that a focus of the Transnational Institute’s work was on the relationship between left-wing economic rights and human rights. 23

As quoted in Mueller’s Democracy’s Think Tank, the Transnational Institute’s statement of purpose explained that it was to be “a community of scholars from different countries who are committed to the search for alternatives to imperialism.” The institute was primarily concerned with “the transnational political economy and those exploited by it, development, militarism, and forms of resistance to imperialism.” IPS fellow Saul Landau, who worked as the Transnational Institute’s third director, wrote that investigating “the world-wide empire managed and dominated from the United States” was the basic principle underlying the Transnational Institute’s work. 24

According to the Transnational Institute, the locations where it has traditionally worked most closely with local movements are the Philippines, Indonesia, South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Palestine, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Myanmar. The institute has also at times maintained close relations with left-of-center Dutch politicians, including Joop Den Uyl (prime minister from 1973-1977) and Hans Van Mierlo (deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs from 1994-1998). Three past Dutch ministers for development cooperation—Jan Pronk, Eveline Herfkens, and Bert Koenders—have also been associated with the Transnational Institute, according to its website. 25

Much like IPS, many of those associated with the Transnational Institute were conspicuous for their left-wing or far-left ideological leanings. In 1981, then-IPS director Robert Borosage was quoted in the New York Times Magazine as explaining that the Transnational Institute’s personnel came “almost completely…out of a Marxist or at least a liberation basis,” as opposed to a liberal one. 26

Left-wing author and activist Naomi Klein credited the Transnational Institute with helping “to create the intellectual frame for the most important movements of my lifetime,” while left-wing academic Noam Chomsky described the institute’s work as “of inestimable value to all of us who hope to understand something about a complex world with many urgent problems and dilemmas.” 27

Orlando Letelier and Saul Landau

Orlando Letelier replaced Ahmad as the Transnational Institute’s director in 1976. 28 Letelier had previously held multiple positions in the administration of Salvador Allende, a Marxist who served as president of Chile from 1970 until he was overthrown in a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973. 29 Letelier was imprisoned for a year after the coup, reportedly only being released after the influential governor of Caracas, Venezuela personally interceded with Pinochet on his behalf. After his release, Letelier accepted a fellowship at IPS, 30 and eventually the directorship of the Transnational Institute. 31

IPS and the Transnational Institute strongly opposed Pinochet’s coup. In February 1974 the Transnational Institute hosted a conference to discuss the coup, which was attended by representatives of IPS and the Transnational Institute, political allies of Allende, and members of a Chilean communist guerrilla group called the Revolutionary Left Movement. According to historian Brian S. Mueller, “the discussions focused less on the coup itself than on what it meant for the future of socialism, especially whether the reformist and constitutionalist route chosen by Allende remained feasible.” 32

Though the Pinochet regime enacted free-market economic reforms that stimulated Chile’s economy—which had suffered greatly under Allende—it also engaged in widespread political repression and human rights violations that included imprisonment, torture, and as many as 3,000 extrajudicial killings. 33 34

Letelier was an aggressive critic of Pinochet. While serving as the Transnational Institute’s director, he argued that the Pinochet regime’s human rights abuses were directly linked to its capitalist economic policies. 35 In a letter to Allende’s daughter, Letelier wrote that his hope for Chile was that “perhaps some day, not far away, we will be able to do what has been done in [communist] Cuba.” 36 In 1976, Letelier personally persuaded the Dutch government to cancel a $60 million industrial development loan to Chile. 37 On September 10 of that year the Chilean government stripped Letelier of his citizenship, accusing him of working to isolate the country internationally. 38

Letelier was assassinated on September 21, 1976 while driving to IPS’s office in Washington D.C., when a bomb that had been planted on his car exploded. 39 The blast also killed his IPS colleague Ronni Moffitt and injured her husband Michael Moffitt. 40 Subsequent investigations led to the prosecution of a number of individuals in connection with the murder, including an American expatriate who had been working for the Pinochet regime’s secret police. 41 A declassified 1987 CIA intelligence assessment concluded that there was “convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder.” 42

During the investigation, the contents of Letelier’s briefcase were leaked to the press. They revealed that Salvador Allende’s daughter Beatriz had promised Letelier payments of $1,000 a month to support his work in the United States, which she said had been approved by another exiled former official in Allende’s government. Beatriz Allende was living in Cuba at the time and was married to a Cuban intelligence official. 43 She later stated that the payments had been made by exiled Chileans “through our own channels.” Investigations revealed that Letelier had received money through the Cuban diplomatic pouch and had been in regular contact with high-ranking Cuban intelligence officials. 44 45 46 His address book also reportedly contained numerous Cuban, East German, and other Eastern Bloc contacts. 47

These revelations led to accusations that Letelier was operating as an agent of the Cuban government. This was strongly denied by IPS, which explained that the funds had been raised from supporters in Western Europe and the United States, not from the Cuban government. 48  Beatriz Allende and Orlando Letelier’s widow Isabel both stated the same thing. 49

Eugene Propper, the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the Letelier murder case, was skeptical that Letelier was operating as a Cuban agent. In his view, Letelier could have accepted assistance via Cuba to further what he considered to be Chilean interests, particularly since he had made no attempt to hide his admiration for communist-ruled Cuba. 50

After Letelier was assassinated in September 1976, IPS fellow Saul Landau succeeded him as the Transnational Institute’s United States-based director. 51 As a contributing author to the Fall 1977- Winter 1978 issue of the journal Cine-Tracts, Landau was described as “the director of the Transnational Institute, the international program of the Institute for Policy Studies.” 52 In 1980, Landau and John Dinges published Assassination on Embassy Row, a book that documented the Pinochet regime’s connections to the Letelier bombing. 53

Like Letelier, Landau was notable for his connections to communist Cuba. He was reported to have been involved in 1969 with the first iteration of the Venceremos Brigade, a group which arranges for sympathetic Americans to visit Cuba in order to learn about and express solidarity with the country’s people and government. 54 That same year, Landau produced the movie Fidel after having filmed a journey through Cuba with the country’s Communist dictator, Fidel Castro, in 1968. Landau’s New York Times obituary described him as “a determinedly leftist documentary filmmaker and writer,” who “said he saw no difference between documentary and fictional films.” 55 56

Landau considered Cuba to be “the first purposeful society that we have had in the Western Hemisphere for many years.” 57 He was interviewed by author Joshua Muravchik in 1980. Landau had by this time reportedly become a personal friend of Castro, whom he described as “one of the most brilliant politicians in the world today,” whose “successes far outnumber his failures.” Landau disputed the characterization of Castro as a dictator and argued that since he enjoyed “enormous popular support,” Castro’s policies were “not dictated to the people, but…most of the time [were] very well in tune with them.” Landau believed no other Latin American government had done as much good for its people as communist Cuba. 58

Basker Vashee

Letelier had directed the Transnational Institute from Washington, D.C., and prior to his assassination had asked Basker Vashee to became the institute’s “resident director” in Amsterdam effective August 1, 1976. 59 The Transnational Institute’s website states that Vashee worked as its director from 1976 to 1985, while Vashee’s 2005 obituary in The Guardian states that he became director in 1977 and left the institute in 1987. 60 61 In annual reports for 1979-1980 and 1983, IPS identified Vashee as director of the “Transnational Institute’s Amsterdam Center,” and the 1983 report stated that he had assumed that position in 1977. 62 63

Vashee, described in The Guardian as “one of Europe’s leading leftwing African intellectuals,” was a native of what was then the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now the country of Zimbabwe. 64  He was active in the movement for Zimbabwean independence and had been imprisoned and deported in 1966 by the apartheid-style Rhodesian government. 65 Vashee was a member of the revolutionary communist Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), and served as the group’s representative in Great Britain for a time during the 1970s. 66 He reportedly participated in the talks leading up to the Lancaster House Agreement in late 1979, which in turn led to Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) being elected as Zimbabwe’s first prime minister in 1980. 67

According to the Transnational Institute, during Vashee’s directorship the institute “became the place in Europe for African liberation movements to meet.” It helped coordinate international boycott efforts against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Future South African president Thabo Mbeki visited the Transnational Institute on multiple occasions in 1983 to discuss potential post-apartheid scenarios for the country. 68 The institute’s executive director since 1995 has been Fiona Dove, who grew up in South Africa and was involved in anti-apartheid activism from an early age. 69

International Development and Anti-Corporate Activism

The Transnational Institute has always maintained a focus on international economics and trade, particularly with respect to countries in what was known during the Cold War as the “Third World,” and has been highly critical of the impact of private multinational corporations on such countries.

In 1976, Transnational Institute fellow Susan George (who had been instrumental in organizing the original 1972 meeting that led to the establishment of the institute) published How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger, a book which had grown out of an institute research project related to the World Food Conference of 1974. 70 In it, George argued that global hunger and malnutrition were not caused by overpopulation, climatic problems, or insufficient arable land, but rather by powerful elites who controlled world food supplies for the benefit of wealthy consumers. 71 According to George, underdeveloped nations should refuse to purchase the latest agricultural machinery and fertilizers from developed countries and multinational corporations to avoid becoming dependent upon them. Historian Brian S. Mueller explained that George believed that “’power,’ more than any other variable, explained hunger,” and favored a “redistribution of power over resources,” instead of mere income redistribution. 72

In its 1979-1980 annual report, IPS explained that a focus of the Transnational Institute was on exploring “the evolving international economic order, its effects on basic human rights and strategies for protecting these rights.” A key facet of this work involved studying and criticizing multinational corporations and banks. 73 Author S. Steven Powell wrote in his 1987 book Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies that “the core aim of [the Transnational Institute’s] work” was “to amass a data base on multinational corporations and to develop ties with unions and research/action groups to thwart corporate expansion.” 74 Then-Transnational Institute fellow (and future IPS director) John Cavanagh directed the institute’s transnational corporations project during the early 1980s. 75

Together with the World Council of Churches, the Transnational Institute established the Transnational Information Exchange (TIE) in the late 1970s to develop and coordinate an international network of researchers and activists to further its global anti-corporate efforts. 76 Powell characterized TIE as part of an institute effort “designed to turn third-world countries against the very corporations that might help them develop most rapidly.” 77

IPS stated in 1983 that the three primary focuses of TIE were the automobile, agribusiness, and information technology industries. 78 Powell identified corporations engaged in agribusiness, nuclear power, and pesticides and chemicals industries, as well as those doing business in apartheid South Africa, as major targets of TIE. He quoted a 1983 issue of TIE-Europe Bulletin, which in turn blamed multinational agrochemical companies for causing a host of problems in developing countries and stated that “fundamentally we can see the problems associated with agrochemicals as inevitable consequences of an international economic system geared towards the accumulation of private profit.” 79

A 1985 TIE report entitled Meeting the Corporate Challenge was focused on promoting the argument that the growth of private multinational corporations had only served to increase poverty for most people living in the Third World. The report sought to highlight examples of activist campaigns undertaken against such businesses, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of those efforts, and ultimately use these findings to increase the likelihood that future anti-corporate campaigns would be more successful. 80

The Transnational Institute immediately began organizing against the World Trade Organization (WTO) after its formation in 1995, “producing the only critical materials available on the WTO in its early years,” and undertaking a worldwide activist training campaign against it. The institute considers the 1999 Seattle anti-WTO protests (sometimes called the “Battle of Seattle”) to be the culmination of these efforts, and it credits those protests with “successfully politic[izing] international trade.” It also claims to have been at the “forefront of organising a civil society response” to the 2008 financial crisis and has been highly critical of European governmental policies that it contends “put markets before people,” such as austerity measures intended to manage national debts. The institute had been actively working on the issue of Third World debt since the early 1980s. 81

The Cold War and Philip Agee

During the Cold War, the Transnational Institute was officially an international program of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), only becoming an independent organization in 1992. 82 While most IPS personnel did not hold especially favorable views of the Soviet Union, they also broadly minimized the Soviet threat and tended to be more critical of the international influence of the United States. Historian Harvey Klehr wrote in his 1988 book Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today that “IPS fellows have consistently maintained that the Soviet threat is largely non-existent and a product of the military-industrial complex in the United States.” 83

Fred Halliday was a fellow at the Transnational Institute from 1973 to 1985, 84 and Klehr wrote in Far Left of Center that he was “a sharp illustration of the skewed moral bookkeeping of the radical left.” 85 As recorded by historian Brian S. Mueller, Halliday disagreed with what he called the “tendency to portray all Soviet military action abroad as negative, imperialistic, etc.” and thought that the Soviet Union’s involvement in Third World countries was in some ways beneficial. He was quoted in 1981 as saying that “the USSR has a duty—to help liberation movements fight for victory,” and defended the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as something that the Soviets had essentially been forced to undertake for national security reasons after having “tried their best to avoid” it. 86

According to the left-wing publication Jacobin, while Halliday initially brought “a Marxist perspective to the study of global politics” through his work, he “later moved away from Marxist political positions” and in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks had “little time for the antiwar movement—or anti-capitalists more generally—whom he accused of dallying with reactionary jihadism.” 87 Halliday was quoted in a 2005 interview as saying that even though he still agreed with many socialist ideas, he no longer called himself one because he could not  “associate with either the authoritarian or the ineffective trends which have defined socialism in recent decades.” 88

As of 1983, Halliday co-directed the Transnational Institute’s New Europe project, the objective of which was “to explore the potential for greater independence for the nations of both Western and Eastern Europe, especially on such security questions as the deployment of nuclear weapons.” The other co-director was Transnational Institute fellow Mary Kaldor, whose earlier work as a member of the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament’s coordinating committee helped form the basis of the project. Kaldor had previously co-edited the 1982 book Disarming Europe, 89 and author S. Steven Powell quoted her as explaining Soviet militarism by arguing that “the Soviet system was developed in opposition to capitalism, and that is its raison d’etre. The role of warfare is defensive, against capitalism.” 90

In the summer of 1990, the Transnational Institute hosted a three-day meeting of activists from both Eastern and Western Europe, focusing on the future of democracy on the continent in the context of the then-ongoing collapse of communism in Eastern Bloc countries. A record of the meeting, which was reportedly among the first such gatherings to be conducted after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, was later published as a book entitled After the Wall. 91

In 1977 the Transnational Institute assisted and briefly housed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) defector Philip Agee, 92 a former case officer who had resigned in early 1969 after twelve years at the agency. 93 In 1975 he published Inside the Company: CIA Diary which detailed clandestine agency operations in foreign countries and identified approximately 250 officers, agents, and organizations that were working for the United States government. Agee was also involved in publishing Covert Action Information Bulletin, which revealed the names and occasionally the addresses of hundreds of additional undercover CIA operatives. 94

Agee, who wrote in 1975 that he “aspire[d] to be a communist and a revolutionary,” was accused of working on behalf of Cuban and Eastern Bloc intelligence services. 95 Former high-ranking KGB officer Oleg D. Kalugin was quoted as having described Agee as “a valuable source” who provided information about CIA operations in Latin America to Cuban intelligence, who in turn passed it on to the KGB. Former CIA officer Frank R. Anderson said that “the simple reality is that [Agee] defected to the enemy during the cold war,” and that “he did everything he could to endanger his colleagues and fellow American citizens.” 96

Inside the Company was published while Agee was living in the United Kingdom, but he was deported from there in 1977. He traveled to Amsterdam, where he lived for a time at the Transnational Institute, which had previously awarded him a fellowship in 1976. 97 98 99 Agee was eventually expelled from the Netherlands, France, West Germany, and Italy, and also spent time living in Grenada and Nicaragua during the 1980s. He died in Cuba in 2008. 100

The War on Terror

The Transnational Institute claims that by 1997 it was warning that the United States “was eager to launch a new war on Iraq.” 101 While institute personnel broadly condemned the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, they also generally faulted the United States for bringing about the global conditions that led to them, particularly in the Middle East. According to the institute, the American-led War on Terror only served to fuel further violence and reinforce “racist and imperialist power structures.” 102 Longtime Transnational Institute fellow Phyllis Bennis published the book Before & After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis in 2002, which was very critical of American foreign policy. 103

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Transnational Institute fellow Walden Bello wrote that “the US government hardly possesses the high ground in the current moral equation,” and speculated that Osama bin Laden had learned to intentionally target civilians by examining how the United States itself had supposedly conducted warfare during the 20th century. Bello claimed that the strategic bombings of Germany and Japan during World War II, and of North Korea during the Korean War, were past examples of American “mass terrorism,” and argued that any American military response to the September 11 attacks would ultimately be counterproductive. He wrote that the true causes of anti-American terrorism in the Middle East were the United States’ support for Israel and its desire “to maintain its petroleum-based civilization,” and that there was “simply too much distrust, dislike, or just plain hatred of a country that has become so callous in its pursuit of economic power and arrogant in its political and military relations with the rest of the world and so brazen in declaring its cultural superiority over the rest of us.” 104

In a 2021 Transnational Institute video entitled “The Racist Roots of the War on Terror,” institute associate Arun Kundnani blamed the United States and its allies for “needlessly killing over a million men, women, and children” in an “industrial slaughter of the poor” which he compared to “the major genocides of the twentieth century.” Kundnani argued that “the victims of the War on Terror were racially dehumanized” by the United States in furtherance of its imperialistic ambitions. 105

Activities

The official mission of the Transnational Institute is “to strengthen international social movements with rigorous research, reliable information, sound analysis and constructive proposals that advance progressive, democratic policy change and common solutions to global problems.” The institute prioritizes what it considers to be the interests of the “Global South” in its work. 106 It engages in both research and advocacy on almost 50 distinct topics, doing so from a broadly left-wing to far-left perspective. 107

In its five-year strategic plan for 2016-2020, the Transnational Institute observed that in contrast to the looser structure that had characterized the group in its early decades, the institute was now “more explicitly embedded within the movements with which it works.” It also identified six programs on which it intended to focus: 108   

  1. Corporate Power and Impunity: “Move towards the establishment of a treaty for binding regulations for transnational corporations, which would end impunity and secure justice for communities affected by corporate abuses.”
  2. Trade and Investment: “To establish the principle that the public interest, governments’ right to regulate and integrity of national judicial systems should not be undermined by trade and investment rules, particularly investment arbitration.”
  3. Agrarian and Environmental Justice: “To improve climate, energy and food security policies that would redirect trade and investment towards sustainable and inclusive food and energy systems, and would genuinely address climate change challenges.”
  4. Public Alternatives: “To advance viable, feasible and progressive proposals on the democratic provision and financing of public goods and services.”
  5. Drugs and Democracy: “To reassess the conventional repressive drugs policy approaches in favour of pragmatic policies based on harm reduction, human rights and development principles.”
  6. War and Pacification: “To make publicly visible permanent war and pacification of resistance.” 109

Anti-Capitalism and Socialism

The Transnational Institute opposes free-market capitalism and supports government control over many economic sectors. 110 The institute blames “neoliberalism and corporate capture of public policy” for undermining democratic governance, and seeks to “strengthen movements to counter corporate power.” It advocates for various restrictions on market operations such as a financial transactions tax and an international treaty to regulate the alleged abuses of multinational corporations. 111

In June 2018, Transnational Institute personnel gathered to produce a report entitled Building Post-Capitalist Futures, in which they argued that “most of the world is experiencing the brutal realities of extreme forms of capitalism” and summarized discussions and thoughts on what political-economic system(s) should replace it. As to the specific method of ending capitalism, the report phrased the question as being whether to “tame it, smash it, escape it or erode it?” 112

In 2020, the Transnational Institute began collaborating with eight other groups to produce The Future is Public: Global Manifesto for Public Services. The institute hosts a website where the manifesto has been published in seven languages. It argues that governments should provide “universal quality public services,” including but not limited to: “education, energy, food, health and care services, housing, social security, telecommunications, transportation, waste collection and disposal, and water and sanitation.” 113

According to the manifesto, such services must be excluded from market competition, provided to everyone regardless of ability to pay, and should be funded by “public resources fairly and progressively collected and (re)distributed.” Doing so would fulfill the manifesto’s ideal of members of society “contributing fairly according to their capacities and ability to pay, in order to meet everyone’s needs and fulfill their rights.” As of May 2023, 236 groups had signed the manifesto including the Democracy Collaborative, Food and Water Watch, the Center for Economic and Social Rights, and the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 114

In 2019, Transnational Institute associate Walden Bello wrote that “loosely regulated finance-driven capitalism” would continue to cause global financial crises unless steps were taken to break its power. He put forth ten policy proposals to reduce the risk of financial crashes. These included nationalizing large financial institutions and implementing full-reserve banking, restricting or eliminating hedge funds and credit rating agencies, dramatically curtailing executive compensation, enacting a total ban on mortgage-backed securities and derivatives, and ending the United States Dollar’s dominance as the most commonly held reserve currency. 115

That same year, the Transnational Institute published the book Public Finance for the Future We Want as a collection of various proposals for radical economic socialization through the elimination of private finance. Contributors argued that government central banks should begin printing enough money to provide “universal basic services and sustainable livelihoods for all,” and that “citizens’ wealth funds” should be established through high taxes on private wealth and the government takeover of up to 10 percent of the outstanding shares of large corporations, with the proceeds to be spent only “for clear social purposes.” Another proposal was for the United States Federal Reserve to “create the necessary money” to enable the government to purchase a controlling stake in companies such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, decommission their oil & gas production capabilities, and transform them into “climate-friendly, publicly owned and democratically controlled entities.” 116

In January 2020, the Transnational Institute published an article written by the Democracy Collaborative’s then-executive vice president Marjorie Kelly, in which she argued that it was “time to make the profit-maximising, shareholder-controlled corporation obsolete.”  Kelly contended that it should be replaced by a new business structure with a mandate to exclusively serve “broad wellbeing and the public good” instead of shareholders, and that ultimately this new type of business structure should be the only one legally permitted to exist. 117

Environment and Climate Change

The Transnational Institute views ownership and control of land “within the broader context of agrarian and environmental justice.” 118 In order to combat what it views as the “key resources in the global capitalist system,” institute personnel have suggested a land use policy called “land sovereignty.” 119 A 2012 institute report defined land sovereignty as “the right of working peoples to have effective access to, use of, and control over land and the benefits of its use and occupation,” based upon a “plural understanding of property rights” that asserts “a people’s enclosure of the land” against corporate capitalist interests. 120

The Transnational Institute believes that “climate change will affect everything” and integrates the issue into all aspects of its work. 121 The institute advocates not only for the elimination of traditional energy sources like oil and gas, but for “a profound transformation of our society” in both an environmental and socioeconomic sense. 122 Institute reports have argued that national defense spending directly harms the climate and environment and that such money could instead be used to fund a global Green New Deal. 123 It opposes market-based methods to address climate change, such as carbon trading—a position that the institute claims was initially poorly received, even by environmentalist groups. 124

In the book Change Finance, Not the Climate, published in 2020 by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute, IPS associate fellow Oscar Reyes argued that climate change necessitated a comprehensive government overhaul of the financial system. He advocated radical “political intervention[s]” designed to “stop the flow of money to oil, coal and gas and establish a clear path that ties de-carbonization to reduced inequality.” Specific proposals included a debt-financed Green New Deal, the introduction of corporate charters requiring companies to operate for the benefit “of workers, customers and the communities in which they are based,” the establishment of “green development banks,” and new regulations pushing public and private divestment from the coal, oil, and natural gas sectors. 125

A pair of May 2023 Transnational Institute podcasts on the concept of “ecofeminism” asserted that “energy is currently produced and consumed based on sexist, racist and classist power relations that favor the pursuit of private profits at the expense of the common good.” The podcasts proposed ecofeminism as an “alternative to the oppressive patriarchal capitalist system.” Ecofeminist analysis was defined as exploring “the connections between women and nature” and seeking to show “the parallels between the oppression of nature and the oppression of women.” However, it was also noted that many ecofeminists consider gender to be a “social construct” and reject any special connection between women and nature as being a manifestation of the “patriarchal frame” that exploits both women and nature. 126 127

Politics and International Affairs

In 2021, the Transnational Institute and the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison co-organized the New Politics Conference 2021 in order to examine and discuss the objectives and strategies of socialist and other radical-left political movements worldwide. The conference agenda included sessions entitled “The Strategic Challenges of (Re)Building Socialist Organization in the Heart of Empire”; “The Crisis of the Capitalist State and the Democratic Socialist Response”; “Radical Economics Reborn? Evaluating the Political Economy of the New Left”; and “Ecosocialist Strategies to Save the Planet.” 128

A summary published by the Transnational Institute after the conference included the conclusions that while “capitalist hegemony can be challenged,” capitalism itself was so “deeply integrated with the state” that those on the far-left needed to do more than simply win elections, and instead needed “to build a counter-hegemonic project which challenges the state in all its dimensions.” Another conference determination was that while it might make sense for groups like the Democratic Socialists of America to work with the Democratic Party on certain issues, the left must always ensure that it retains its “political independence from the center.” Other published takeaways were that the left “must integrate feminist, anti-racist and intersectional perspectives” into its activism, as well as promote eco-socialism as a solution to climate change via “a publicly-owned and planned approach to energy and decarbonization.” 129

In 2021 the Transnational Institute’s single largest project was Just Peace Myanmar, which accounted for a full 32 percent of its project spending that year. 130 The institute has described its Myanmar program as seeking “to strengthen (ethnic) civil society and political actors in dealing with the social and humanitarian challenges posed while working to bring about an inclusive and sustainable peace.” In April 2023, it published an extensive report on the persistence of armed conflict in the country and how attempts to conclude a ceasefire between warring factions and move forward with a durable peace process have failed. 131

In November 2022, the Transnational Institute co-published a study entitled Smoke Screen: How States are Using the War in Ukraine to Drive a New Arms Race. The authors (two of whom were institute staff members) argued that increased military spending among NATO allies in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was “an entirely reckless and useless exercise and a shameful waste of resources” that would be better spent on things like addressing climate change. They contended that Western “militarism” would only serve to prolong the war and fuel future ones. 132 One of the authors, Transnational Institute program coordinator Niamh Ni Bhriain, wrote elsewhere that peace in Ukraine could not be achieved through a military victory, and that by continuing to defend itself with sophisticated Western-supplied weaponry Ukraine had done nothing but make “its people cannon fodder.” 133

In April 2023, Canadian activist Harsha Walia was interviewed on a Transnational Institute podcast episode entitled “Why We Need to Abolish Borders.” Summarizing the episode, the institute wrote that “Borders uphold a global system of apartheid—and we should demand nothing less than their abolition.” According to the institute, Walia made “a compelling case for abolition: No banks, no bombs, no borders, no bosses” and she laid out “how borders and citizenship maintain colonial axes of power.” 134

State of Power 2021

Every year, the Transnational Institute publishes a report entitled “State of Power,” which it describes as “an anthology on global power and resistance.” 135 The State of Power 2021 report was entitled “Coercive World,” and its focus was on examining global military, police, and other state security forces and outlining “emancipatory visions and ideas to end the violence of the state.” An accompanying webinar further explored “ideas and strategies for confronting and ending repressive state power.” 136

Featured essays in State of Power 2021 included “Israel: the Model Coercive State and Why Boycotting it is Key to Emancipation Everywhere” by Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activist Alys Samson Estapé, in which she argued that while “extreme racism and colonialism” were at the “roots of the Israeli state,” the country’s “apartheid regime” was also intrinsically linked to the profitability of its arms industry. Estapé accused Israel of perpetrating an “ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians,” who were themselves engaged in “a fundamentally anti-racist and anti-colonial effort.” She blamed Israel for profiting while its military technology spreads “death and repression across the globe.” Estapé urged a worldwide boycott of Israel to isolate it “politically, economically and culturally” until it stops its “racist and colonial project aimed at expelling, repressing and subduing the Palestinian people.” 137 Numerous observers, including the Anti-Defamation League, consider the BDS movement to be at least partially rooted in antisemitism. 138

Another essay was entitled “Abolish National Security,” written by Arun Kundnani. In it, he summarized a wide variety of radical “abolitionist” policy proposals including nuclear disarmament, the cessation of new military weapons systems development, the total legalization of drug use, halting all United States support for counter-terrorism operations in other countries, and re-orienting American foreign policy towards prioritizing debt relief and reparations programs. Kundnani argued that parallel domestic “abolitionism” would eliminate the need for armed police and prisons, the existence of which he blamed on racism and “neoliberalism, which involves declaring large numbers of people as ‘surplus.’” He contented that “rebellions against racial and colonial domination are the indispensable emergencies around which US security policy and practice has usually been organised,” and blamed the United States for “not facing up to the irreversibility of its geopolitical decline.” 139

State of Power 2021 also featured an interview with Georgetown University professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and University of Witwatersrand professor Achille Mbembe entitled “Becoming Black: Coercive Power, the State and Racism in a Time of Crisis.” The interview was set against the backdrop of the radical-left Movement for Black Lives and “the brutality of US policing,” and sought to examine “racial capitalism” and how “modern day coercive state power” supposedly has its roots in Western colonialism. 140

Leadership

The Transnational Institute is governed by a supervisory board that consisted of three members as of July 2023. 141 In addition to its full-time staff, the institute also works with consultants, volunteers, and associates. It describes its associates as “internationalist intellectuals with a track record of progressive activist-scholarship and a passionate commitment to social change.” As of July 2023, the Transnational Institute listed over three dozen associates on its website, several of whom also hold or previously held positions at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), including IPS senior advisor and former director John Cavanagh and IPS project director Phyllis Bennis. Former IPS board chair Peter Weiss is listed on the institute’s “associates” page, though he is not identified as such. Left-wing broadcast host Laura Flanders is also a Transnational Institute associate. 142

Fiona Dove is executive director of the Transnational Institute, having held the position since 1995. A native of South Africa, she was involved in anti-apartheid activism during the 1980s, including as a member of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). She has sat on the boards of Friends of Code Red in the Netherlands, and the Pluto Educational Trust in the United Kingdom. 143

Imad Sabi is chair of the Transnational Institute’s supervisory board. He has worked as a senior program coordinator for Oxfam IBIS in Denmark, as a senior program officer for the Open Society Foundations in the United Kingdom, and as a program manager for Oxfam Novib in The Netherlands. He has served on the boards of the Bank Information Center, the Global Campaign for Education, the Arab Campaign for Education for All, and Engaged Donors for Global Equity, and has chaired the board of the Center for Economic and Social Rights. 144 145 146

Susan George is president of the Transnational Institute, which is an honorary position. 147 George became active in politics during the 1960s in large part due to her opposition to the Vietnam War, and she was instrumental in convening the original 1972 meeting of activists and funders in Paris that directly led to the founding of the Transnational Institute. George has written several books, the most well-known of which is How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger published in 1976. George sat on the board of Greenpeace International from 1990 to 1995, and from 1999 to 2006 she was vice president of the Association for Taxation of Financial Transactions to Aid Citizens, a French activist group. 148

Financials

The Transnational Institute is certified as a public benefit organization by the Dutch government and has been recognized as holding the equivalent of 501(c) status in the United States. The institute reported total revenue of €4,248,219 in 2021. That year, it received approximately 41 percent of its revenue from the Dutch government, 29 percent from the governments of other countries, and 21 percent from philanthropic funders. Revenue in past years totaled €4,389,601 in 2020, €4,472,327 in 2019, and €4,668,153 in 2018. 149 Total revenue increased to €5,215,640 in 2022. 150

In 2021, 82 percent of the Transnational Institute’s expenditures were for program activities. Of the €4,027,054 the institute spent on its projects, the largest share went to Just Peace Myanmar (32 percent), Agrarian and Environmental Justice (16 percent), Public Sector Alternatives (16 percent) and Just Trade and Investment (14 percent). 151

Foundations and other nonprofits established and funded by George Soros, including the Foundation to Promote Open Society, the Open Society Foundations, and the Open Society Policy Center, made a combined $2,951,139 in grants to the Transnational Institute from 2016-2021, with at least $2,070,139 of that being provided by the Foundation to Promote Open Society. 152 The Rockefeller Brothers Fund awarded $905,000 in grants to the Transnational Institute from 2018-2021. 153 In its 2022 annual report, the Transnational Institute disclosed that it also had active funding agreements with Thousand Currents ($41,000), the Climate Emergency Collaboration Group ($49,000), Tides ($100,000), and the New Venture Fund (two agreements for $200,000 total), among other contributors. 154

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