Richard Peet

J. Richard Peet (born 16 April 1940 in Southport, England) is emeritus professor of human geography at the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester MA, USA. Peet received a BSc (Economics) from the London School of Economics, an M.A. from the University of British Columbia, and moved to the USA in the mid-1960s to complete a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. He began teaching at Clark University shortly after completing his PhD from Berkeley, and has remained there with secondments in Australia, Sweden and New Zealand. He is married to geographer Elaine Hartwick and lives in central Massachusetts.
Scholarly contributions.
Peet’s areas of interest include social and economic geography, the geography of power, political ecology, liberation ecology, development theory, geography of consciousness and rationality, philosophy and social theory, and critical policy studies.
Peet’s doctoral research applied von Thunen’s theories to the global expansion of commercial agriculture. However much of his later work was inspired by living in the racially and socially charged situation in America during the 1960s. His early books and articles helped define the field of radical and critical geography. Peet has written extensively on a variety of topics. Along with other authors such as David Harvey he was part of a movement of radical geographers that have drawn on Marxist theory and techniques. He uses the techniques of political economy, looking for interconnections and processes at a variety of scales and over time. Peet believed that geography must do more than simply provide explanations and descriptions of problems studied, but rather attempt to propose alternatives.
During the 1980s and 1990s Peet's focus shifted to the politics and ecology of international development, particularly the systematic underdevelopment of nations peripheral to the capitalist west. His work is critical of neo-liberal development theory and global governance institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. He was a supporter of the socialist revolution in Grenada, working there prior to the US invasion in 1983.
Peet founded the radical journal of geography, "Antipode", in 1970 and was an editor until 1985. He co-edited "Economic Geography" from 1992-1998. In 2008 he founded a new independent journal, "Human Geography: a new radical journal", free of the influence of large publishing houses. He is now working on a new book on global finance capital.