Michael Watts (geographer)

For those of a similar name, see Michael Watt (disambiguation).

Michael J. Watts is "Class of 1963" Professor of Geography and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading critical intellectual figure of the academic left. An intensively productive scholar, he works on a variety of themes from African development to contemporary geopolitics, social movements and oil. As Perrault notes, his work charted a "rigorous and wide-ranging theoretical engagement with Marxian political economy" (Perrault, 2004:323,[4]), 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.

This should not obscure the fact that during the early 1980s Watts adhered to a populist analysis, and that the politics of identity of which he is now critical was criticized earlier, by non-Geographers who engaged with populists linked to the subaltern studies project of that decade. His main role has tended to be not that of an innovator so much as a conduit; to transmit ideas generated outside geography by non-geographers, communicating them to other geographers who don’t yet know about these external theoretical developments. Geographers who are unaware of the origin of these ideas occasionally attribute them in error to the messenger. reference needed.

Raised between Bath and Bristol in the UK, Watts received his bachelor's degree in geography and economics from University College London in 1972 and his PhD in 1979 from the University of Michigan. His PhD work was on agrarian change and politics in Northern Nigeria, published as Silent Violence in 1983. He joined the faculty of the Geography Department at UC Berkeley in 1979, and 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. Watts was named a 2003 Guggenheim fellow for his research on oil politics in Nigeria, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences[5] at Stanford University (2004), and the Smuts Lecturer at Cambridge University in 2007. In 2004 he was awarded the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

On July 25, 2007, he was shot in the hand in Port Harcourt, Nigeria by unknown gunmen.

Watts is married to Mary Beth Pudup, who is a UC Santa Cruz faculty member, and has two children. He is a member of Retort, 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. In 2006, Jontathan Nitzan, a professor of political economy at Canada's York Universty and Shimshon Bicher an Israeli professor of economy in several Israeli colleges and universities alleged that Much of Retort's explanation -- including both theory and fact -- contained in their book was plagiarized, "cut and pasted, almost as is," from their several essays and books including "The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition," a 71-page chapter in their book, The Global Political Economy of Israel (Pluto 2002), as well as "It's All About Oil" (2003), "Clash of Civilization, or Capital Accumulation?" (2004), "Beyond Neoliberalism" (2004) and "Dominant Capital and the New Wars" (2004). In a long essay titled Scientists and the Chruch they argued that the reason for Clark and his Retort colleagues theft of their intellectual content was rooted in the ancient clash of science and church. Retort's plagiarism, they contended was "part of the constant attempt of every organized faith -- whether religious or academic, liberal or Leninist, fundamentalist or postist -- to disable, block and, if necessary, appropriate creativity and novelty. Creativity and novelty are dangerous. They defy dogma and undermine the conventional creed; they question the dominant ideology and threaten those in power; their very possibility challenges the church's exclusive hold over truth. And that challenge is a cause for panic -- for without this exclusivity, organized religion becomes irrelevant." Verso, the publisher of Afflicted Powers, never responded to Nitzan and Bichler's complaint.

Books

• 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. (ISBN 9780684314549 ) (First Edition, 1998, awarded the African Studies Association Conover-Porter Prize for Reference Books.)
• 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.
• Watts, MJ and P Little (eds.) 1997. Globalizing Agro-Food. 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]

Recent articles

• Watts, MJ. 2007. Revolutionary Islam and Modern Terror. In Allan Pred and Derek Gregory (eds)., Violent Geographies, London, Routledge, pp. 175-205.
• Watts, MJ. 2007. The sinister political life of community[6], in G. Creed, The Romance of Community, SAR Press.
• Watts, MJ. and I Boal. 2006. The Liberal International. Radical Philosophy, 140, Dec, pp. 40-45.
• Watts, MJ. 2006. Empire of Oil. Monthly Review, 58/4, 1-16.
• Watts, MJ. 2006. Neither There War nor their Peace/All Quiet on the Eastern Front. In Okwui Enwezor (ed)., The Unhomely. BIACS @: Seville, pp. 27-31 (reprinted in New Left Review, 41, September 2006, pp. 88-92.
• Watts, MJ. 2006. Culture, Development and Global Neoliberalism.[7] in S.Radcliffe (ed)., Culture and Development in a Globalising World, London, Routledge, pp. 30-58
• Watts, MJ and A Zalik. 2006. Imperial Oil.[8] Socialist Review, April.
• Watts, M.J. 2005. Baudelaire over Berea, Simmel over Sandton? Public Culture 17/1. [9]
• Watts, M.J. 2005. Righteous Oil?: Human rights, the oil complex and corporate social responsibility.[10] Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 30
• Watts, MJ. 2004. Resource Curse? Governmentality, Oil and Power in the Niger Delta, Nigeria. Geopolitics [Special issue] 9/1.
• McKeon N, MJ Watts and W Wolford. 2004. Peasant Associations in Theory and Practice. [11] Civil Society and Social Movements Programme Paper Number 8, UNSRID.
• Watts, MJ. 2003. Thinking With the Blood. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24/2.
• Watts, MJ. 2003. Development and Governmentality. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24/1, pp. 6-34.
• Watts, MJ. 2003. Alternative Modern: Development as Cultural Geography, in S. Pile, N. Thrift and K. Anderson M. Domosh, (eds)., Handbook of Cultural Geography, Sage: London, pp. 433-453.
• Watts, MJ. 2002. Migrations. Commentary on Sebastiao Salgado. Occasional Paper # 26, Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley, pp. 35-42.
• Watts, MJ. 2002. Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Some Thoughts on Peasants and the Agrarian Question. Oesterreichische Zeitschrift fuer Geschichtswissenschaften, 4, pp. 22-51 (and commentary pp. 51-61).
• Watts, MJ. 2002. Hour of darkness. Geographica Helvetica, 57/1, pp. 5-18.
• Watts, MJ. 2002. Green Capitalism, Green Governmentality. American Behavioral Scientist, 45/9, pp. 1313-1317.
• Watts, MJ. 2001. Lost in Space. Progress in Human Geography, 25/4, pp. 625-628.
• Watts, MJ. 2001. "2001 Black Acts", New Left Review, 9, pp. 125-140.
• Watts, MJ. 2000. "1968 and all that...", Progress in Human Geography, 25/2, pp. 157-188.
• Watts, MJ. 2000. "Violent Geographies: speaking the unspeakable and the politics of space", City and Society, XIII/1,pp. 83-115.
• Watts, MJ. 2000. "Development Ethnographies", Ethnography 2/2, pp. 283-300.
• Watts, MJ. 2000. "Development at the Millennium", Geographische Zeitschrift, 88/2, pp. 67-93.
• Watts, MJ. 2000."Political Ecology", in T. Barnes and E. Sheppard (eds.), A Companion To Economic Geography, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 257-275.
• Watts, MJ. 2000. "The Great Tablecloth", in G. Clark, M. Gertler and Feldmann (eds.), A Handbook of Economic Geography. London, Oxford University Press, pp. 195-215.
• Watts, MJ. 1999. "Islamic Modernities," in James Halston (ed)., Cities and Citizenship, Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 67-102.
• Watts, MJ. 1999. "Collective Wish Images: Geographical Imaginaries and the Crisis of Development," in John Allen and Doreen Massey (eds.), Human Geography Today, Cambridge, Polity Press, pp. 85-107.

References

• Faculty page
• A video interview, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
• Perrault, T. 2004. Michael Watts. In P. Hubbard, R. Kitchen, and G. Valentine (eds.), Key Contemporary Thinkers on Space and Place. London: Sage. pp. 323-329

• Doolittle, W. and S.P.J. Batterbury. 2007. Michael Watts. 2007 Netting Award Winner, Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, Association of American Geographers.

External links

• "Professor shot in Nigerian Delta" BBC News
• "Watts's lecture at the Hettner institute - Germany 1999."