Omar in front of IRIS, November 2005. I think at this point I was trying to get him to smile.

There are certain people I don’t maintain relationships with. Haven’t seen them in years; don’t keep in touch. But I like them. Fiercely. I respect what they do. And I know that we’re all working toward the same goal: repairing the world. My friend Karim Kasim, in his lovely poetic and Egyptian way, says that these people form our “circle of love” — they somehow sustain you by the simple fact that they understand you, share some of your values, and are in the world doing their thing.

Omar Azfar was part of my circle. He died yesterday — January 21, 2009 — of bone cancer. I’m shocked and saddened. I didn’t even know he was sick.

I met Omar in October 2004. We worked at the IRIS Center, a small consulting firm/think tank founded by Mancur Olson in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland.  We were both there until somewhere around the spring of 2006, when I left to work freelance with the aim of moving back to Montreal and he went on to a professorship at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York.

Omar was an economist and an expert on corruption, decentralization, and governance. He did his undergrad at Oxford in philosophy, politics, and economics, and his PhD at Columbia.  How bad-ass is that? He was a slender, good-looking guy with a slightly English accent. Smart and friendly; sometimes arrogant and vain. (I had to take his photo once for the IRIS website and he gave me such a hard time, but as you see from the photo above I luckily captured his beauty and intelligence.) He would wear a ripped t-shirt and jeans to work and then clean up real nice when it was time to give a presentation.

We worked together on a few projects: a corruption assessment toolkit, a summary of a technique to figure out which survey respondents are lying, explaining how corruption undermines healthcare. I looked through these today to remember him. (You can type his name into the IRIS search tool to see more of his writing.)

His passing is a loss to all of us.

You can download photos I took of Omar in front of IRIS in November 2005 (Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3). I’m dedicating them to the public domain. Take them and use them well.