Reflections. Walden Bello Interviewed by Rosalba Icaza

Walden Bello, one of the leading representatives of the global justice and solidarity movement (GJSM), was born in Manila, Philippines in 1945. He received his PhD in sociology from Princeton University in 1975, and has been a full professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman since 1997. He was recently appointed Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada, and Adjunct Professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He has taught or held the position of Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Los Angeles, Irvine and Santa Barbara; he was Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Irvine in 2004 and was awarded an honorary PhD by Panteion University in Athens, Greece, in 2005. During the 1970s and 1980s, Bello became a key figure in the international movement to restore democracy in the Philippines, co-ordinating the Anti-Martial Law Coalition and establishing the Philippines Human Rights Lobby in Washington. From 1995 to 2007, he served as the executive director of Focus on the Global South, an institute working on global justice issues affiliated with Chulalongkorn University. Currently, Bello is the president of Freedom from Debt Coalition, a member and former chair of the board of Greenpeace South East Asia and a board member of Food First, the International Forum on Globalization, and the Transnational Institute.