Margarita Balmaceda

Prof. Dr. Margarita M. Balmaceda

Senior Fellow

© priv.

E-Mail
margarita [dot] balmaceda [at] rifs-potsdam [dot] de

Margarita Balmaceda was born in Argentina, and grew up there and in Puerto Rico. Her life changed course at age sixteen when, after a three-day bus trip across the United States, she started studying Russian at UC Berkeley, later complemented by intensive training in Ukrainian, Hungarian, and German. After studying the connection between science policy and foreign policy in the USSR for her PhD in Politics from Princeton University, a Ford Foundation-funded Post-doctoral year at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute helped ground her research in Ukrainian Studies, her core academic community to this day.

Seeking an alternative to what she saw as simplistic Moscow-centered analyses and seeking to study energy and resource politics from the perspective of local stakeholders, she has conducted extensive research in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, and Hungary. Her research path took a new turn in 2022 when Russia's war on Ukraine thwarted a planned Fulbright research stay there and she was allowed to transfer to RIFS, where a steep learning curve and the opportunity to retool her Ukraine expertise to bear on important sustainability conversations make her say "carpe diem!" every day of her new RIFS stay starting in June 2024.

  • Professor, (Full Professor with Tenure), School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University, Sept. 2010-
  • Associate Professor with tenure (1999-2003 Assistant Professor), School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University, 2003-2010
  • Assistant Professor 1995-1999 (Instructor, 1993-1995); Department of Political Science and Public Administration, The University of Toledo
  • Instructor/Consortium Fellow, Department of Political Science, Vassar College, 1991-1993
  • Lecturer, Princeton University, 1990-1991

Research affiliations:

  • Associate, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2001-)

Margarita Balmaceda is a political scientist working at the intersection of international relations, the political economy of authoritarianism and democracy, and technology.

Her main field of research are:

  • International Political Economy
  • Resource Politics
  • Ukrainian Studies
  • Post-Soviet studies
  • Decarbonization of (formerly) centrally-planned economies
  • Steel industry
  • Chemical industry

Publications prior to joining the RIFS

  • 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) Reprinted in paperback: (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press,, 2023).

  • The Politics of Energy Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania Between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Pressure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013, ppk 2015).

  • Energy Dependency, Politics and Corruption in the Former Soviet Union: Russia's Power, Oligarch's Profits and Ukraine's Missing Energy Policy, 1995-2006 (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). Reprinted in paperback: (London and New York: Routledge

  • Balmaceda, M., Workshop on Post-Soviet Politics and Economics, ""Steel, industrial carbon and geopolitics (pre-draft of chapter 4 of book-in-progress on The Last Frontier of Decarbonization: Hidden Industrial Carbon between Geopolitics and Climate Change)"," Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States. (April 19, 2024).

  • Balmaceda, M., Workshop on the Geopolitics of Cross-border Electricity Grids, "Studying wider Europe's electricity geopolitics : what can a decarbonization gaze add to the research agenda?," Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, Penn State University, State College, PA, United States. (April 15, 2024).

  • Balmaceda, M., Ukrainian Fulbright Circle, "What Chinese Fertilizers Tell Us About Ukraine," Fulbright Program, Online, Kyiv, Ukraine. (March 27, 2024).