In May 2020, Dr Noor Hasharina Hassan (my doctoral supervisor) and I published a scholarly article on the characteristics or underlying qualities of poverty (available on open access here), adapted from the literature review of my PhD thesis. The article has garnered over 60 000 views or reads and has been cited 88 times. It is shaping discussions about the concept of poverty, as shown in this X (formerly Twitter) thread by Indonesians, for example.

The article has also proved invaluable to students, and it is heart-warming to hear them expressing their gratitude for it.

This article is essentially a product of frustration. At the time I was undertaking my doctoral research, literature on the characteristics of poverty, albeit widely available, was fragmented and rarely discussed the influence of these characteristics on poverty analysis. I, therefore, had a hard time piecing together literature on the characteristics of poverty from different sources and making sense of it for poverty analysis in my effort to build the foundation for my doctoral study on the language, meanings, causes, dimensions and classification of poverty in Brunei. This experience prompted my doctoral supervisor and me to develop and publish a full scholarly article in a bid to make it easier and more straightforward for future poverty researchers, as well as organisations and individuals involved in fighting poverty, to understand the characteristics of poverty and their implications for poverty analysis and eradication. We are on course to achieving this objective since the article has so far received over 40 000 reads and has been cited 55 times.

And do I agree with all that existing literature says about the characteristics of poverty? As we concluded in our article, the literature states that poverty has a language and is multidimensional, complex, individual or context-specific, and absolute or relative. Indeed, the concept of poverty possesses all but one of these characteristics – that which states that poverty is also relative, an argument that I maintained up until our 2022 study of poverty myths in Brunei, featured as a chapter in our upcoming academic book on poverty in Brunei. Poverty is, as I blogged here, an undesirable life condition that one experiences without reference or comparison to the living conditions of others in society.

I am immensely grateful to the 40 000+ individuals who took the time to read our article and to those who will read the article in the future. I am keen to hear about your experiences or observations on the article. Feel free to send an email or leave a comment below.