Patrick Bond


Patrick Bond is professor at the University of the Western Cape School of Government. From 2015-19, he was distinguished professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand Wits School of Governance. Before that, from 2004, he was senior professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he directed the . His research interests include political economy, environment, social policy, and geopolitics.

Background

Bond was born in Northern Ireland and his family moved to Alabama in the United States when he was seven, during the Civil Rights era. He was educated at Swarthmore College Department of Economics and the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked with several social justice agencies in Washington and Philadelphia during the 1980s. He then enrolled in a doctoral program, supervised by David Harvey, at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering where he received his Ph.D. in 1993.
He relocated to South Africa in 1990 and worked with Johannesburg NGOs including Planact, during the early and mid-1990s. From the end of the apartheid regime in 1994 until 2002, he was in Mandela's new South African government, authoring or editing more than a dozen policy papers including the Reconstruction and Development Programme and the RDP White Paper. He also taught at the University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management from 1997-2004.

Contributions

Bond's work is primarily on the political economy of Africa, international finance, eco-social development and political ecology, and development issues in contemporary South Africa. He works in urban communities and with global justice movements in several countries. He has launched strong critiques against neoliberal governance regimes in South Africa and beyond, and the failures of capitalist states to tackle social justice and environmental degradation. A theme over the years has been his views on South Africa’s move from racial to class apartheid, in the form of Neoliberalism.
He is a prolific author, and one of the most highly cited social scientists in South Africa.
Bond is an advisory board member of several international journals: Socialist Register, International Journal of Health Services, Historical Materialism, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, Studies in Political Economy, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Review of African Political Economy, and the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. He has also written for Z Communications.

Major publications

Books