Reflections: Michael Watts interviewed by Murat Arsel

Michael Watts is ‘Class of 1963’ Chair in Undergraduate Studies and Chancellor’s Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Born and raised in rural southwest England, Watts studied at University College London and completed his PhD in 1979 at the University of Michigan. Bringing long-term ethnographic research in Africa and critical engagement with Marxist political economy to bear on themes such as Third World poverty, food security, the agrarian question, oil-led development and violence, Watts has long been a leading figure in development studies and African studies as well as being instrumental in the development of the field of political ecology. Having published numerous articles in scholarly journals in geography and beyond, he is also the author and editor of several books including Silent Violence (1983), Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent (1992, with A. Pred), Liberation Ecologies (1996 and 2004, with R. Peet), The Hettner Lectures: Geographies of Violence (2000), Violent Environments (2001, with N. Peluso) and the Curse of the Black Gold (2008, with photographer Ed Kashi). He was director of the African Studies Centre from 2005 to 2008 and of the Institute of International Studies at Berkeley from 1994 to 2004. He has been named a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, and is currently completing a book on oil and insurgency in Nigeria.