The sudden death of Professor Samir Amin was announced on 12 August 2018. He dedicated his life, research work, and political praxis to the post-colonial liberation of countries of the South from their colonial heritage. Probably, Samir Amin was the only renowned Third World economist in universities across the world. In the 1960s, he broke into economic thinking, which, up till then, was a restricted area, at the margins of science. With a rare intelligence and eloquent criticism, he brilliantly echoed the voice of the South. He denounced the world economic system that was driving the marginalisation of economically weak countries, as it were at that time, and contributed to reflection on more global solidarity before the emergence of global justice movement.

Generations of students, researchers and scholars from Dakar to Jakarta, from Cairo to Sao Paolo and from Paris to Pekin were nourished by the works of Samir Amin. They covered topical issues in Third-World countries, ranging from his thoughts and theories on the global economy, development, the trend of Third-World politics to his analyses on Islamism and neo-liberalism. But beyond the economist and the great thinker whose thoughts marked the world, was the man who chose to live a simple life, fully dedicated to his ideas and thoughts.

Samir Amin was born on 3 September 1931 in Cairo to an Egyptian father and to a French mother. He spent his childhood and early years in Port Saïd, a small town where his father practised medicine and the metropolitan city of Cairo, which his family regularly visited.  Samir Amin was marked by his cosmopolitan Coptic middle class family, which was sensitive to the socio-political conditions in Egypt and the world. Long discussions with his father and mother, who were both committed to social issues and who, especially, provided free medical care to poor families in Port Said’s neighbourhoods, shaped his adolescent political awareness.  His youthful years determined his life path and his choice to inscribe his experience, right from his adolescent years, in the history of communist political commitment and Arab, African and international militancy. Samir Amin attended Port Said’s French school where he obtained his baccalaureat in 1947. He moved to Paris the following year and obtained a second baccalaureat in Elementary Mathematics in the Lycée Henri IV.   

Samir Amin’s outstanding academic career started once he obtained his second baccalaureat. He enrolled in the grandes écoles and universities in Paris from where he graduated with a degree in Political Science; he successfully completed another graduate degree programme in the INSEE. Under the supervision of the great Professor François Perroux, Samir Amin started working on global accumulation for his doctorate thesis. The thesis is considered the work of his life because it enabled him to structure his thoughts and develop a critical analysis of the world system and the marginalisation of Third World countries. The work was acclaimed by the French academic system, which was renowned for its hostility toward Marxist thinking. Samir Amin’s thesis was seminal to an economic analysis major global school of thought, which enabled the understanding of the structural reasons for the marginalisation of weaker economies. The thesis was published as an essay titled : « L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale » and became a historical milestone globally. Nevertheless, his research work did not weaken his militancy and political commitment. Samir Amin took part in all the struggles for the independence of Third World countries and was known in this context by most nationalist leaders, some of whom rose to rule their countries at independence.

At the end of his university studies, Samir Amin passed the graduate teaching exam in Economics and was appointed professor in the University of Reims. However, after teaching for a few months, he decided to resign from the position and travel to Third World countries, especially to the then recently independent African countries, to provide support for the reconstruction of their economies and liberating them from the colonial economic model. This entailed long trips from Cairo to Dakar through Bamako, Paris and other destinations. The period was probably the golden age of Samir Amin’s exceptional career combined with political commitment and academic research. At that time, especially when he was the director of the African Institute for Economic Development (IDEP) in Dakar,  Samir Amin contributed to development of the most innovative thoughts in economic policy that made him famous worldwide. His reputation attracted great thinkers of that time like the former President of Brazil, F. Cardoso, Celso Furtado, and Immanuel Wallerstein to Dakar to discuss with him and build networks of intellectual thought of the South, from Latin America to Arab Africa.

However, the experience started showing its weaknesses in the early 80s following the failure of the modernisation of Third World economies, the debt crisis beginning 1982 and the crash of Third Worldism. The 80s and 90s were characterised by triumphant neo-liberalism, championed by Prime Minister Magaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and President Ronald Reagan in the United States of America. This era marked the start of globalisation and calling to question of the Nation-State model.  The neo-liberal offensive was not restricted to developed countries; it equally swept across Third World countries through structural adjustment programmes imposed by the Washington sisters – the World Bank and the IMF. Despite Samir Amin’s virulent criticism of neo-liberalism and the structural adjustment programmes through the Third World Forum and the think thank, which he created in Dakar and which still brings together radical intellectuals and economists from all countries of the South, the 80s and 90s were extremely dry years for him and radical Third World thought.  

However, thanks to the anti-globalisation movements, global social fora, and the Porte Alegre summits, Samir Amin returned to the limelight and to international debates by the late 90s and early 2000s and recovered his youth. Together with Toni Negri and other radical critics of globalisation, who are driven by the anti-globalisation movements, he invested his energy, till his death, in providing support to these movements through his writings and as a facilitator and speaker at major international gatherings.        

Samir Amin of built an exceptional career of a man of the century with an unwavering commitment that led the young Egyptian across the world and which closely connected his personal experience to that of ideas, the fight for a different world and the freedom of people of the South.