Walden Bello (Closing)

Bello's current and immediate past roles include:

• Executive director of Focus on the Global South
• Member of the House of Representatives (Parliament) of the Republic of the Philippines representing Akbayan Party
• Professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines (1997-2009)
• Member and former Chair of the board of Greenpeace South East Asia
• Board member of Food First, the International Forum on Globalisation, and the Transnational Institute
• awarded the Right Livelihood Award (aka the "alternative Nobel Prize") in 2003 and was named Outstanding Public Scholar of the International Studies Association's Political Economy Section in 2008
  

Walden Bello was born in Manila in the Philippines in 1945. He was studying in Princeton for a sociology Ph.D in 1972 when Ferdinand Marcos took power, and plunged into political activism, collecting his Ph.D, but not returning to the university for another 20 years.

Over the next two decades, he became a key figure in the international movement to restore democracy in the Philippines, coordinating the Anti-Martial Law Coalition and establishing the Philippines Human Rights Lobby in Washington. He was arrested repeatedly and finally jailed by the US authorities in 1978 for leading the nonviolent takeover of the Philippine consulate in San Francisco. He was released a week later after a hunger strike to publicise human rights abuses in his home country.

In 1995, he was co-founder of Focus on the Global South, of which he is now executive director. Focus seeks to build grassroots capacity to tackle wider regional issues of development and capital flows. When the Asian Financial Crisis struck two years later, Focus played a major role advocating a different way forward.

Walden Bello is one of the leading critics of the current model of economic globalisation, combining the roles of intellectual and activist. As a human rights and peace campaigner, academic, environmentalist and journalist, and through a combination of courage as a dissident, with an extraordinary breadth of published output and personal charisma, he has made a major contribution to the international case against corporate-driven globalisation.

Bello has won praise for his writing, as the author or co-author of 15 books on Asian issues and a range of articles, notably American Lake: The nuclear peril in the Pacific (1984) (co-authored with Peter Hayes and Lyuba Zarsky), People and Power in the Pacific (1992), Dark Victory: The United States and Global Poverty (1999), Global Finance: Thinking on regulating speculative capital markets (2000) and The Future in the Balance: Essays on Globalisation and Resistance (2001); The Anti-Development State: the Political Econmy of Permanent Crisis in the Philippines (2004); and Dilemmas of Domination: the Unmaking of the American Empire (2005), Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009).