Watts, Michael (1951–)

Michael J. Watts is a Marxist geographer specializing in political ecology and economic geography. Born in England, Watts has published more than 200 scholarly articles, books, and essays that have appeared in leading journals in geography and anthropology. His work focuses on the politics of oil, agrarian political economy, and development. Much of that work is based on field research in Nigeria and West Africa and related work in India, Vietnam, and the United [Page 3079]States. He is the Class of 1963 Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1979. Watts's scholarly work combines his commitments to social change with his formidable intellect, yielding a wide-ranging body of work whose influence extends far beyond geography.

Watts is widely regarded as a founding figure in the field of political ecology for his initial research on the politics of famine in Nigeria during the 1970s. Drawing from his training in cultural ecology and anthropology at the University of Michigan under Roy Rappaport, Bernard Nietschmann, Eric Wolf, and Michael Taussig, Watts brought Marxist political economy to bear on questions of nature and society. He argued that famines were crises of distribution that laid bare the structural inequalities of capitalist markets as means of distribution, challenging the prevailing neo-Malthusian accounts of famine as instances of scarcity created by the demands placed by a growing population on natural resources. Watts's arguments also challenged Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's critical explanation of famine as an outcome of the social curtailment of freedom.

One of the last students to receive a doctorate in geography at the University of Michigan, Watts's approach contrasted sharply with the lingering influences of Carl Sauer's “Berkeley School” of geography that he encountered as a new professor. At Berkeley, Watts developed his approach to political ecology through engagement with questions of culture, power, and political economy through participation in critical efforts to rethink Marxist political economy. In particular, Watts drew on the works of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson to address the importance of culture to questions of nature, resource struggles, and society, engaging with poststructuralism and the cultural turn in the social sciences. Together with Alan Pred, he developed a critical approach to studying capitalism in terms of its historically and geographically specific patterns of accumulation and forms of resistance. Watts continues to develop these themes through research on the politics of oil in the Niger Delta, bringing Foucaultian-inspired analytics to bear on questions of governance and natural resources.

A geographer unburdened by the disciplinary bounds of the field, Watts has helped influence a range of research as a collaborator, colleague, and advisor. At Berkeley, Watts served as director for the Institute for International Studies from 1994 to 2004, founding a series of seminars and colloquia that shaped a generation of scholarship. In particular, the Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics, which he cofounded with Nancy Peluso and Donald Moore, has become a critical locale for debates on environment, cultural politics, and political economy. He has also worked with Gillian Hart to build Berkeley's programs in development studies and African studies. He has directed more than 60 doctoral dissertations, and many of his students are now prominent scholars in geography. He is also one of the more highly regarded lecturers on the Berkeley campus. Watts has received numerous awards and accolades during his career, including a Guggenheim fellowship in 2003 for his work on oil in Nigeria. He delivered the first talk in the Hettner Lecture series at the University of Heidelberg in 1999.

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