Michael Watts (geographer)

Michael J. Watts (born 1951 in England) is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He retired in 2016. He is a leading critical intellectual figure of the academic left.
His first book, Silent Violence:Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (1983, 2013), is considered a pioneering work in political ecology. Other published works include Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent (1992, with Allan Pred), Liberation Ecologies (1996, 2004, with Richard Peet), The Hettner Lectures: Geographies of Violence (2000), Violent Environments (2001, with Nancy Lee Peluso) and the Curse of the Black Gold (2008, with photojournalist Ed Kashi). Watts has also been an assistant editor of the award-winning New Encyclopedia of Africa (2008) and its predecessor, the Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara (1997).
After spending his childhood in a village between Bath and Bristol, Watts attended University College London, from which he received his distinction bachelor's degree in geography in 1972.
Watts received his PhD in geography in 1979 from the University of Michigan. His PhD work was on agrarian change and politics in Northern Nigeria, based on over two years of fieldwork and archival research and supervised by Bernard Q. Neitschmann, before the Michigan Geography Department was disestablished. It was published in revised form as Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria in 1983. Silent Violence is considered a pioneering work in the field of political ecology.
Watts joined the faculty of the Geography Department at UC Berkeley in 1979 and remained there his whole career. He served from 1994 to 2004 as Director of the Institute of International Studies, a program that promotes cross-disciplinary global and transnational research and training. He has supervised over 75 PhD students and post-docs, including those contributing to a Festschrift volume in 2017 edited by Chari, Friedberg, Gidwani, Ribot and Wolford.
Watts is married to Mary Beth Pudup, who is a UC Santa Cruz faculty member, and has two children. He is a member of the Retort collective, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.
Watts is also on the advisory board of FFIPP-USA (Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-USA), a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace. In 2021, with other faculty at the University of California, he joined a letter calling Palestinian activism "a global movement for liberation from settler colonialism and racial apartheid."
On 25 July 2007, Watts was shot in the hand in Port Harcourt, Nigeria by unknown gunmen who attacked the office of the National Point newspaper, apparently in an attempted robbery.
Watts works on a variety of themes from African development to contemporary geopolitics, social movements and oil politics. As Tom Perrault notes, his work charted a "rigorous and wide-ranging theoretical engagement with Marxian political economy", with contributions to the development of political ecology, struggles over resources, and – more recently – how the politics of identity play out in the contemporary world. His first major study, Silent Violence, dealt with the effects of colonialism on the susceptibility of Northern Nigerians to food shortage and famine. Over the last decade he has continued to work in Nigeria, but on the political ecology of oil and the effect of oil exploitation on Ogoni people in the Niger delta. He has also explored issues of global agriculture and food availability, gender and households, irrigation politics, and Islam.
Watts's work has been much debated in the social sciences, in terms of its attachment to Marxist and post-Marxist theory, and in terms of the appropriate role for academic thinking in contemporary struggles against inequality and poverty alleviation.