Prof. Natalie Koch
Fellow
Natalie Koch is Professor of Human Geography at Heidelberg University's Institute of Geography. She is a political geographer working on geopolitics, nationalism, state power, and resource governance in authoritarian contexts. Dr. Koch's current research is focused on energy and environmental policy in the Arabian Peninsula, where she examines how different actors and institutions are promoting sustainability and "post-oil" development agendas in the region. She has published extensively in journals such as Political Geography, Geopolitics, and Society and Natural Resources, and she is the author of The geopolitics of spectacle: Space, synecdoche, and the new capitals of Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018) and co-editor of the Handbook on the changing geographies of the state: New spaces of geopolitics (Edward Elgar 2020).
- energy transition
- energy geopolitics
- Middle East
- Arabian Peninsula
- authoritarianism
- resource nationalism
Publications at the RIFS
Publications prior to joining the RIFS
- Koch, N. 2021. The desert as laboratory: Science, state-making, and empire in the drylands. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 46(2): 495-509.
- Koch, N. 2021. Whose apocalypse? Biosphere 2 and the spectacle of settler science in the desert. Geoforum 124: 36-45.
- Koch, N. 2021. Food as a weapon? The geopolitics of food and the Qatar-Gulf rift. Security Dialogue 52(2): 118-134.
- Koch, N. 2021. The political lives of deserts. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111(1): 87-104.
- Koch, N. 2021. Desert geopolitics: Arizona, Arabia, and an arid lands response to the territorial trap. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. 41(1): 88-105.
- Koch, N. 2021. Environmental geopolitics in Central Asia. In J. Van den Bosch, A. Fauve, and B. De Cordier (eds.), European handbook of Central Asian studies: History, politics and societies. Hannover: ibidem, 811-852.
- Koch, N. and V-P. Tynkkynen. 2021. The geopolitics of renewables in Kazakhstan and Russia. Geopolitics 26(2): 521-540.
- Koch, N. 2021. The Gulf's sovereign wealth fund cities. AspeniaOnline: International Analysis and Commentary.
- Koch, N. 2020. German pigs, and the autocrats who loved them. Los Angeles Review of Books.
- Koch, N. 2019. AgTech in Arabia: 'Spectacular forgetting' and the technopolitics of greening the desert. Journal of Political Ecology 26 (1): 666-686.
- Koch, N. and T. Perreault. 2019. Resource nationalism. Progress in Human Geography 43(4): 611-631.
- Koch, N. 2018. Green laboratories: University campuses as sustainability 'exemplars' in the Arabian Peninsula. Society & Natural Resources 35(1): 525-540.
- Koch, N. and V-P. Tynkkynen. 2018. Renewables in Kazakhstan and Russia: Promoting 'future energy' or entrenching hydrocarbon dependency? PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo #538.
- Koch, N. 2018. The geopolitics of renewables in Kazakhstan. GW Central Asia Program Memo #211.
- Koch, N. and A. Valiyev 2016. Restructuring extractive economies in the Caspian basin: Too little, too late? PONARS Eurasia. Policy memo #441.
- Koch, N. 2016. Why no "water wars" in Central Asia? Lessons learned from the Aral Sea disaster. PONARS Eurasia. Policy memo #410.
- Koch, N. 2015. The violence of spectacle: Statist schemes to green the desert and constructing Astana and Ashgabat as urban oases. Social and Cultural Geography 16(6): 675-697.