Michael Watts is an internationally renowned human geographer based at Berkeley. He has applied Marxist theory to the analysis of agrarian societies, notably in Nigeria, where he developed social and historical explanations of food insecurity and famines that, he argued, resulted primarily from a disruption of community solidarity by decades of colonialism. Instrumental in the development of political ecology, he has worked on a variety of resource conflicts, notably over oil, placing them in the emergence and form of contemporary capitalism.