Michael Watts

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. Watts has also been an assistant editor of the award-winning New Encyclopedia of Africa and its predecessor, the Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara (1997). Silent Violence is considered a pioneering work in the field of political ecology.

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 is Non-resident Long-term Fellow for Programmes on the Political Economy of Development and Development Policy at Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden.

Scholarship 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. 2016–2017, Berlin Prize (Siemens Fellowship), American Academy in Berlin 2010, Conover-Porter Award for Africana Bibliography or Reference Work, African Studies Association for New Encyclopedia of Africa (associate editor) 2004, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University 2004, Awarded the Victoria Medal, Royal Geographical Society 2003, Guggenheim fellow for his research on oil, politics and economies of violence in Nigeria 2000, winner, Conover-Porter Award for Africana Bibliography or Reference Work, African Studies Association for Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara (assistant editor); also 1998 honorable mention 1997–1998, Chancellor's Professorship, University of California, Berkeley 1994, Distinguished Research Award, Association of American Geographers 1984, Distinguished Teaching Award, National Council for Geographic Education

Books Levien, M, MJ Watts & Y Hairong (eds.). 2019. Agrarian Marxism. Routledge. Rajan, R., A. Romero, and M.J. Watts (eds.). 2016. Genealogies of Environmental Thought: The Lost Works of Clarence Glacken. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Horowitz L.S. and M.J. Watts (eds.). 2016. Grassroots Environmental Governance: Community engagements with industry. London: Routledge. H Appel, A Mason and MJ Watts. (eds.) 2015. Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas. Ithaca. Cornell University Press. Boal, I., C. Winslow, J. Stone and MJ Watts (eds.). 2012. West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California. Oakland: PM Press. Peet R, Robbins P and MJ Watts (eds.). 2011. Global Political Ecology. Routledge. Watts MJ (ed.) with photographs by E. Kashi. 2008. Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. Brooklyn NY: Powerhouse Books. Associate editor. 2007. New Encyclopedia of Africa (ed. Joseph C. Miller) Simon and Schuster, New York (5 volumes). Second Edition. Winner of the 2010 Conover-Porter Award for Africana Bibliography or Reference Work, Africana Librarians Council; Update to Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara (1997), a 1998 Conover-Porter honorable mention, a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, Library Journal's Best Reference awardee Retort collective (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts). 2005. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. London: Verso. Peet, R & Watts, MJ (eds). 2004. Liberation Ecologies (2nd edition). Routledge. (first edition 1996) Peluso N. and MJ Watts (eds.). 2001. Violent Environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Watts, MJ. 2000. The Hettner Lectures: Geographies of Violence. Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg. review Johnston RJ, D Gregory, G Pratt, MJ Watts, DM Smith. (eds) 2000. Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. Goodman, DS, and MJ Watts (eds.) 1997. Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring . London and New York: Routledge. RJ Johnson, P Taylor, and MJ Watts (eds.) 1995. Geographies of Global Change. Blackwell. Second Edition 1998, Third Edition in 2002. P.D. Little & M.J. Watts (eds.) 1994. Living under contract: contract farming and agrarian transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Pred, A. and M.J. Watts (eds.) Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Watts, M.J. 1987 (ed.). State, Oil and Agriculture in Nigeria. Institute of International Studies Press, University of California, Berkeley. Watts, MJ. 1983. Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria. Berkeley: University of California Press. [runner-up for Herskovitz Prize, 1984, reprinted 2013, University of Georgia Press]

Articles and chapters

(reprinted as )

(and commentary pp. 51–61).