Michael John Watts

Non-resident Long-term Fellow for Programmes on the Political Economy of Development and
Development Policy, SCAS.
Class of ‘63 Professor of Geography Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley.
Visiting Professor, University of Chicago

Michael J. Watts is Class of ‘63 and Chancellor’s Professor of Geography Emeritus and Co-Director
of  Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught for over forty-
four years.  He served as the Director of the Institute of International Studies at Berkeley from 1994
to 2004 and was Director of Social Science MATRIX at Berkeley in 2019–20.

Watts was educated at University College London and the University of Michigan, has held visiting
appointments at the Smithsonian Institution, and at universities in Bergen, Bologna, London and Berlin,
and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 2004-2005.
He served on the Board of Advisors of a number of non-profits, including Food First and the Pacific
Institute. He served as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Social Science Research Council for a
decade. Watts is a member of the British Academy, was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2003 and was awarded
the Victoria Medal by the Royal Geographical Society in 2004, and the Berlin Prize by the American Aca-
demy in Berlin in 2016. He was awarded the Ester Boserup Prize in 2024. At Berkeley, he has chaired over
100 PhD dissertation  committees and served as second or third readers on as many again.

Watts’ writing has addressed a number of development issues especially famine and food security, political
violence and the agrarian question in Africa, South Asia and Vietnam, natural resources and especially the
energy and mineral sectors, and the political economy of development and governance, more generally.
Watts has worked for UNDP, OECD and other development organizations, including the Ford, Rockefeller
and MacArthur Foundations. He has published over fifteen books and three hundred articles and has worked
extensively with the renowned photographer Ed Kashi. Recently, Watts has written extensively on the oil
industry, extractive economies and international commodity trading firms.

At SCAS, Watts will continue working on a book project on neoliberalism and the Global South, on trans-
parency and governance in the oil and gas sector, and on the political economy of conflict and security in
Nigeria.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.