Margarita M. Balmaceda (PhD, Princeton University) is Professor of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University. Concurrently, she is an Associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, and heads the Study Group on “Energy materiality: Infrastructure, Spatiality and Power” at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg (Germany). Her research analyzes the connections between natural resources, international relationships and political development, with a special expertise in energy politics (oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, renewables), steel and the metallurgical sector in Ukraine, the former USSR, and the EU.

Her books include: The Politics of Energy Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania Between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Pressure (Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 2013), Living the High Life in Minsk: Russian Energy Rents, Domestic Populism and Belarus’ Impending Crisis (Budapest: CEU Press, 2014), and Energy Dependency, Politics and Corruption in the Former Soviet Union (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). Capitalizing on her Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian and German skills, in addition to her native Spanish, she has conducted extensive research in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Hungary, Germany and Finland. In Spring 2021, as Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellowship in Ukrainian Studies at HURI, she will conduct a project on Mariupol between Oligarchs, Russian Aggression, and Global Metallurgical Markets. Her new book, Russian Energy Chains: the Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union (forthcoming with Columbia University Press) analyzes how differences in the material characteristics of different types of energy can affect how different types of energy may be “used” as sources of  foreign and domestic power.