Margarita M. Balmaceda

Margarita M. Balmaceda (MA, PhD, Princeton) is Professor of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and a Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.. Supported by, among others, three Fulbright grants and a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Union, she has conducted extensive field research in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, and Hungary. Using original-language local materials, her work develops a view “from inside” of  complex international political economy problems affecting the post-Soviet states, in particular energy politics issues.

She is the author of, among others, Energy Dependency, Politics and Corruption in the Former Soviet Union (Routledge, 2008), Living the High Life in Minsk: Russian Energy Rents, Domestic Populism and Belarus’ Impending Crisis (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014), and The Politics of Energy Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania Between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Pressure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), a 2015 Choice Outstanding Academic Title awardee. Her book Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union, resulting from her work as Woodrow Wilson Fellow, is due out in May in the Wilson Center Series at Columbia University Press.