With great sadness I learn of Bob Deacon's passing. We've worked together since 2009 when we both joined the Scientific Committee of CROP (Comparative Research on Poverty) -- a lively think tank jointly sponsored by the International Social Science Council and the University of Bergen. Bob took charge of editing the new CROP Poverty Briefs, a series of concise (ca. 2500 words) essays that provide an accessible and practically useful take on some particular issue in poverty research or anti-poverty practice (www.crop.org/Publications/BriefsSeries/). He also was closely involved in envisioning and planning future CROP activities, such as CROP workshops in developing countries and CROP panels at international conferences. Among our last collaborations was a contribution he wrote for a CROP volume I co-edited on the Millennium Development Goals -- an essay he provocatively titled "Social Solidarity must Replace Poverty Eradication in the Post-2015 Development Agenda." Shortly after, Bob invited Mitu Sengupta and me to write an essay on human rights and the SDGs for a volume he was editing under the title Social Policy and the Transformative Potential of the Sustainable Development Goals as a special issue of the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy. Both these volumes appeared only last year. In a world where many academic poverty researchers and poverty officials in the national and international agencies and non-governmental organizations remain aloof from the real problem of the world's poor, Bob Deacon tirelessly worked to bring us back to the concrete practical-political task of working alongside the poor for their full substantive equality as fellow citizens of their countries and the world. His work and inspiration will live on.
Thomas Pogge
Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs
Yale University, PO Box 208306, New Haven, CT 06520-8306