Margarita Balmaceda

Ph.D., Political Science, Princeton University, 1996
Associate Professor, School of Diplomacy and International Affairs, Seton Hall University
Center Associate, Davis Center

Contact Information
617-623-1954
balmacma@shu.edu

Research Interests
I am interested in the relationship between politics and economics, and domestic and foreign polices in the context of the post-Soviet transition. I look at this question though the prism of energy policies and politics in those energy-poor post-Soviet states which are also important players in the transit of Russian oil and gas to Western Europe, in particular Ukraine and Belarus. Further transit countries of interest include Moldova, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia and, Poland and Hungary.

Current Projects
"Natural Resource Rents, Foreign Policy and Political Transformation in the Former USSR and Eastern Europe"; "The Politics of Energy Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania Between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Power, 1992-2010" (book); "Turning Economics into Politics, Dependency into Power: Belarus, Russia and Energy under Lukashenko, 1994-2009" (book).

Selected Publications
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).

“Corruption, Intermediary Companies, and Energy Security: Lessons of Lithuania for the Broader Central-East European Region,” Problems of Post-Communism, Vol. 55, No. 4, July/August 2008, pp. 16-28.

“Understanding Repression in Belarus,” in Robert Rotberg (Ed.), The Worst of the Worst: Rogue and Repressive States in the World Order (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2007), pp. 193-222.

Co-Ed. (with James Clem and Lisbeth Tarlow), Independent Belarus: Domestic Determinants, Regional Dynamics and Implications for the West (Cambridge: HURI/Davis Center for Russian Studies: distributed by Harvard University Press, 2002)

Ed., On the Edge: The Ukrainian-Central European-Russian Security Triangle (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000).