High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! 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,), 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.