Michael Watts Institute of Australian Geographers & The New Zealand Geographical Society Conference 2014

Michael Watts

Michael J. Watts is Class of ‘63 Professor of Geography, and Director of Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where he has taught for thirty years He served as the Director of the Institute of International Studies at Berkeley from 1994-2004. His research has addressed a number of development issues especially food security, resource development and land reform in Africa, South Asia and Vietnam. Watts has published Over the last twenty years he has written extensively on the oil industry, especially in West Africa and the Gulf of Guinea; his most recent book is “The Curse of the Black Gold: Fifty Years of Oil in the Niger Delta” with photographer Ed Kashi. Watts was a Guggenheim fellow in 2003 and was awarded the Victoria Medal by the Royal Geographical Society in 2004. He has consulted for a number of development agencies including the United Nations and other development organizations and has provided expert testimony for governmental and other agencies. He was educated at University College London and the University of Michigan and has held visiting appointments at the Smithsonian Institution, Bergen, Bologna, and London. He serves on the Board of Advisors of a number of non-profits including Food First and the Pacific Institute. He is currently Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Social Science Research Council. Over the last decade I have focused on the political ecology of oil in West Africa and on the relations between oil – understood materially, biophysically, socially and symbolically – and the field of conflict in Nigeria in particular. One aspect of this research program is to understand the relations between oil and the rise of an insurgency across the Niger delta oilfields.