Patrick Bond (born 1961, Belfast, Northern Ireland) is Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg Department of Sociology, where he directs the Centre for Social Change. From 2020 to 2021 he was professor at the University of the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015 to 2019, 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 Centre for Civil Society. 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. His father was an aeronautical engineer who worked for NASA. He was educated at Swarthmore College Department of Economics and the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve for two years. He worked with several social justice agencies in Washington and Philadelphia during the 1980. He then enrolled in a doctoral program at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering where he received his Ph.D. in 1993 ("Finance and uneven development in Zimbabwe", 1992). He relocated to Southern Africa in 1989, where he took a position at the University of Zimbabwe's Department of Political and Administrative Studies (1989–90) and then Planact (1990–1994). From the end of the apartheid regime in 1994 until 2002, he co-authored or edited more than a dozen policy papers for the new South African government including the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and the RDP White Paper. He also taught at the University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management from 1997 to 2004. Patrick has 2 children, Lee and Jan.
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 an 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 (York University), International Journal of Health Services (Johns Hopkins School of Public Health), Historical Materialism, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development (American University), Studies in Political Economy (Carleton University), Capitalism Nature Socialism, Review of African Political Economy, and the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities (Unesco, New York). He has also written for Z Communications.
Major publications
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