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

Photo of Michael John Watts

Photo: Stewen Quigley

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 Academy 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 transparency 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.

SCAS Talks Podcast - Episode 39: Oil and Its Afterlives: The Past and the Future of Oil in Nigeria External link, opens in new window.