Michael Watts
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Siemens Fellow - Class of Fall 2016

Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley Michael Watts has published widely on Nigeria and the Niger Delta. For ten years he served as director of the Institute of International Studies, which promotes cross-disciplinary research and training on global issues. He established the Berkeley Working Group on Environmental Politics and directed the Africa Studies Center and Rotary Peace Fellows program. His work has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Royal Geographical Society.

 
Watts’ research demonstrates a long engagement with theories of political economy, particularly mass poverty in the Third World. During the 1980s and 1990s he conducted fieldwork in Senegambia on gender, household dynamics, irrigation politics, continued his work in Nigeria on Islam, and examined the political economy and ecology of oil. He has worked with development organizations and philanthropic institutions such as the UN Development Programme, Ford Foundation, OXFAM, and small NGOs, most recently, Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria.

 
His first major study, Silent Violence: Food, Famine, and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (California, 1983; reprinted 2013), dealt with the effects of colonialism on the susceptibility of Northern Nigerians to food shortage and famine. Watts’ Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in The Niger Delta (powerHouse, 2008), featuring images by photojournalist Ed Kashi, traces the history of Nigeria’s oil interests and the resulting environmental degradation and conflicts in the region.

Project Description

Life without Authority: Oil, Violent Conflict, and the Politics of Ressentiment in Nigeria

In his Academy project, Watts draws on his extensive knowledge of Nigerian micropolitics and regional dynamics to detail the relations of a range of social actors who are impacted by the effects of oil capitalism and the uneven capacities of the Nigerian state. He locates the rise of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria and contemporary insurgencies in the Niger Delta region within their historical and political context. In contrast to “resource curse” theorists, who reduce the analysis of the impact of oil to the manner in which state institutions and ruling elites act, Watts also studies the social actors in the struggle for redistribution. At the same time, he shows how the state and its uneven capabilities have been able to absorb and inflect such conflicts, even in the face of the existence and perpetuation of the illegitimacy of many public institutions, and to reproduce itself through a particular sort of statecraft. The project thus serves as a case study for grasping the relations between political violence and forms of authority, issues of pressing global importance often little understood outside specialist circles.

Academy Activities

21 Sep 16

Fellow Spotlight: Michael Watts

Michael Watts is Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. For ten years he served as director of the Institute of International Studies, which promotes cross-disciplinary research and training on global issues. He established the Berkel ...

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31 Oct 16

Life without Authority: Generational Politics in West Africa

Michael Watts’ lecture focuses on two home-grown insurgencies in Nigeria: Boko Haram, a radical Islamist movement located in the dry and arid northern Muslim heartlands, and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), arising from the largely Christian oil-fields of the southe ...

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