Perhaps more than any other writer, TNI fellow (now President) Susan George has popularised the understanding of power and the consequences of globalisation. Her first book, How the Other Half Dies; the Real Reasons for World Hunger, published in 1976, proved to be a ground-breaking work. Scholar-Activist George has published over a dozen influential books on many subjects of concern to social movements. Another TNI Fellow, Howard Wachtel, wrote what is still seen as the seminal work on global finance – The Money Mandarins.
In 1978, TNI helped set up the Transnational Information Exchange (TIE) to support the international labour movement and others with studies of multinational corporations and their role in shaping global trends in production and consumption.
In 1982, TNI started working actively on Third World Debt, setting up a debt project in 1985, many years before others made debt a popular issue. Susan George’s A Fate Worse than Debt and the Debt Boomerang are classics in the field. In 1995, TNI was among the first to draw attention to the dangers of the World Trade Organisation, producing the only critical materials available on the WTO in its early years, and running countless workshops for activists in Europe and the South. These activities, among others, came to a head at the historic 1999 Battle of Seattle, which successfully politicised international trade.
In 2009, TNI returned to its critique of corporate power with renewed vigour, launching a global campaign to stop corporate impunity, looking to expose the architecture of legal impunity that corporations enjoy and putting forward proposals for binding legislation to prevent corporate crimes.
TNI was part of the initial agenda-setting efforts among social movements that resulted in the international Global Campaign to Reclaim People’s Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity (Global Campaign) being launched at Rio+20 in 2012. Just two years later, following an initiative of the Ecuador and South African governments, the UNHRC established an Open-Ended Inter-Governmental Working Group (OEIGWG) to develop an international treaty.