Professional Affiliation

Professor, School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University

Expert Bio

Margarita Balmaceda is Professor of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and an Associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). Her education includes a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, and Post-doctoral training at Harvard University/. She has conducted extensive research in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, and Hungary with the goal of studying energy and resource politics and relationships from “inside” and looking at the goals and interests of local stakeholders. Her research analyzes the connections between natural resources, technology, international relationships and political development, with a special expertise in energy-industrial chains such as steel and fertilizers in Ukraine, the former USSR and the EU. Her book, Russian Energy Chains: the Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union (New York: Columbia University Press 2021), received the Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize and the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize.

Expertise

• Energy
• Environment
• Russia and Eurasia
• Europe

Wilson Center Project

The Last Frontier of Decarbonization: Hidden Industrial Fossil Fuels Between Geopolitics and Climate Change

Project Summary

During her tenure as a Fellow, Margarita Balmaceda will be working on a book on The Last Frontier of Decarbonization: Hidden Industrial Fossil Fuels Between Geopolitics and Climate Change (under contract with Columbia U. Press). While most research on decarbonization has focused on renewables-based electrification, industries using fossil fuels as feedstock, for chemical reactions, and for high-temperature industrial processing (as in plastics, cement, steel and fertilizer production, producing over 15% of global CO2 emissions), the most difficult to electrify, have been largely ignored. Focusing on two sectors where fossil fuel use has been especially hard to replace (steel and nitrogen fertilizers), and one sector key for their replacement (green hydrogen), this book brings these largely hidden fossil fuels to the center of discussion. In particular, her work will make use of Center’s strengths on China and its use of industrial fossil fuels as tool of diplomacy.

Major Publications

• Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021)
• Living the High Life in Minsk: Russian Energy Rents, Domestic Populism and Belarus’ Impending Crisis (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2014)
• with Per Högselius, Corey Johnson, Heiko Pleines, Douglas Rogers, Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen, "Energy materiality: A conceptual review of multi-disciplinary approaches," Energy Research & Social Science, Vol. 56 (2019) Open access: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629618309198?via%3Dihub

Previous Terms

September 8, 2015-May 26, 2016