[1] Other published works include Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent (1992, with Allan Pred), Liberation Ecologies (1996, 2004, with Richard Peet), The Hettner Lectures: Geographies of Violence (2000), Violent Environments (2001, with Nancy Lee Peluso) and the Curse of the Black Gold (2008, with photojournalist Ed Kashi).

[3] After spending his childhood in a village between Bath and Bristol, Watts attended University College London, from which he received his distinction bachelor's degree in geography in 1972.

His PhD work was on agrarian change and politics in Northern Nigeria, based on over two years of fieldwork and archival research and supervised by Bernard Q. Neitschmann, before the Michigan Geography Department was disestablished.

[7] In 2021, with other faculty at the University of California, he joined a letter calling Palestinian activism "a global movement for liberation from settler colonialism and racial apartheid.

"[8] On 25 July 2007, Watts was shot in the hand in Port Harcourt, Nigeria by unknown gunmen who attacked the office of the National Point newspaper, apparently in an attempted robbery.