This book has been long in the making and even longer in conception, and I am indebted to many people who shared parts of the journey. First are those people we might categorise as relatively poor if we must, who have generously shared their time, thoughts and experiences with me through the course of my own forays into engagement, exchange and research. I am humbly grateful to them for having given me insights and richness in so many ways, about and far beyond the subject of poverty.
More specifically, my foremost acknowledgement is to my wife, Mary Zsamboky, who is always an incredible source of support and inspiration. She helped me through many of the deep moments of discouragement with this book and through the numerous convoluted knots I had woven with the text. As two full-time working parents, much of her support has also been in the form of patience and in distracting our two very rambunctious young daughters while I have been absorbed with writing and rewriting this book, although the moments she engaged with the text and the ideas within it have shaped me and the book profoundly.
Other friends and colleagues have also been of great support. In particular, Andy Sumner has been a wonderful source of encouragement and is exemplary in his generosity with feedback, comments and general sharing, right up to the last finishing touches of the book. He also emboldened my initial steps towards this book in the late 2000s and I owe him much of the scholarly attention that was brought to my initial work beyond the subject of Tibet and China. Ben Radley and Charmaine Ramos provided extremely useful comments in the final revisions of the book, as did the anonymous reviewers and Maria Gabriela Palacio Ludeña on an earlier draft. Emma Cantal Dadap provided much-needed assistance in the preparation of the manuscript and, together with Ana Lucía Badillo Salgado and Benedict Yiyugsah, the three have proven to be a wonderful team of PhD researchers with whom to explore some of the ideas in this book, particularly around the subject of social protection. Thanks are also due more generally to the numerous colleagues and students, inside and outside of ISS and previously LSE, who shared with me parts of my intellectual and research meanderings that contributed to different tangents of the book. They are too numerous to list here, although I trust that they will recognise themselves if and when they read this.
With regard to earlier influences, I remain indebted to Kari Polanyi Levitt for her depth of knowledge and breadth of vision in the field of development economics, which have undoubtedly shaped the ways that I started approaching the study of poverty when I returned to academia for my PhD. James Putzel, my PhD supervisor at LSE, has remained an incredible source of support and friendship ever since, and always reminds me to keep my eye on the ball, in terms of the strategic political significance of our scholarship in the current context. The person who at first contributed most to my more technical understanding of poverty measurement was Athar Hussain, my other PhD supervisor at LSE, as well as Tim Dyson, on matters pertaining to demography and population studies. Tim’s example as a consummate social scientist, in the true sense of the word ‘scientist’, as well as a wonderfully gracious person, continues to provide me with a role model. The work of Thandika Mkandawire has also greatly influenced me and I feel privileged to have been able to cross paths and exchange ideas with him over the past ten years or so.
Finally, thanks are also due to Ashwani Saith for having given me the opportunity to dig my teeth into teaching poverty at LSE, where I first taught on his course and then took it over from him when he left. The meeting of many like minds at ISS also provided fertile ground for developing the ideas of this book, notably Murat Arsel, Arjun Bedi, Erhard Berner, Jun Borras, Bram Büscher, Amrita Chhachhi, Anirban Dasgupta, Arjan de Haan, Wendy Harcourt, Roy Huijsmans, Rosalba Icaza, Mahmoud Messkoub, Jos Mooij, Susan Newman, Howard Nicholas, Bridget O’Laughlin, Auma Okwany, Robert Sparrow, Max Spoor, Servaas Storm, Ben White and Marc Wuyts, among others.
Special thanks are also due to the editors at Zed Books, who have been incredibly patient with my delays at delivering this manuscript, in particular Kim Walker and more recently Dominic Fagan. Other people involved with them on the production side have also been a pleasure to work with, namely Megan Symons. The people working at or with CROP have also had endless patience with me, namely Jakob Horstmann, Maria Sollohub and Charlotte Lillefjære-Tertnæs. I am of course honoured to have been selected for the 2015 International Studies in Poverty Prize, which was a huge boost of encouragement to finally complete this book project, which I had been working on since 2008. I sincerely hope that the result honours this award.
Infinite gratitude is reserved for my parents, Phyllis and Conrad Fischer, who impressed on me a deep commitment to peace and social justice that I can only hope to mimic. My mother in particular remains an inspiration in the depth, breadth and durability of her commitment, with a humility and wisdom that I have simply never encountered in the many years that I have now spent studying and working in academia. Whenever I write, I think of her discerning gaze over the relevance of whatever I manage to transcribe and of her example as to how to live the values we profess.
Finally, it should be noted that much of the work on this book has been completed under the auspices of the AIDSOCPRO project (Aiding Social Protection: The Political Economy of Externally Financing Social Policy in Developing Countries), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 638647).