Walden Bello is one of the most influential political writers the Philippines has produced, a scholar whose ideas shaped a global argument about the world economy. In 2003 he won the Right Livelihood Award, often called the Alternative Nobel, for educating civil society about the costs of corporate globalization, and in 2008 the International Studies Association named him its Outstanding Public Scholar for a lifetime of work on the political economy of development.

Born in 1945 and trained as a sociologist at Princeton, he came of age politically when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972. He spent the next two decades organizing against the dictatorship, and in 1978 he was jailed in the United States for leading a nonviolent occupation of the Philippine consulate in San Francisco, released only after a hunger strike. During his years with the research group Food First he obtained roughly three thousand pages of confidential World Bank documents, the basis for Development Debacle (1982), a book that helped fuel the movement that ousted Marcos in 1986.

His central idea arrived in Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy (Zed Books, 2002), which argues not for reforming the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank but for radically reducing their power, in favor of a decentralized system that lets countries set their own course. It extended an argument he had been making since the 1990s, that the institutions built at Bretton Woods had outlived whatever good they once did, and it placed him among the leading critics of corporate globalization, an intellectual who never stopped being an organizer.

He carried the argument into office, serving in the Philippine House of Representatives for the Akbayan party-list from 2009 before resigning in 2015 over policy disputes with President Benigno Aquino III, a departure he framed as a matter of principle. Before and after Congress he helped lead Focus on the Global South, the Bangkok institute he co-founded in 1995, and he has written or co-authored more than twenty books, many of them translated into other languages, on globalization, debt, food politics, and the future of the Left.

A 2025 Jacobin profile called him one of the most influential activist intellectuals opposed to the Washington Consensus, and quoted Naomi Klein calling him the world's leading no-nonsense revolutionary. For a reader trying to understand how the Global South has argued back against the economics of the last half century, Bello is the place to start.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.