Natalie Koch
Biographic Data
| ID | 233176 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Natalie Koch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Natalie |
| FAMILY NAME | Koch |
| SIGNATURE | KOCH N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Syracuse University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4064-4620 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 73 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 779 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 69 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography
The symbolic power of sustainability
Sustainability has a unique symbolic power in the contemporary political landscape, as ordinary people, governments and institutions grapple with the effects of the climate crisis. Proponents of megaprojects have tapped into the symbolic power by framing their initiatives as “green,” however resource-intensive they might really be. This article illustrates how this works in the UAE through a case study of Expo City Dubai, the greenfield site deve…
Green nationalism from above
All nationalisms have multiple storylines that evolve in response to changes in global affairs. The shifting geopolitical and ecological circumstances surrounding climate change are contributing to the strengthening of “green nationalisms” around the world — including in authoritarian states. This article examines the rise of green nationalism in the UAE, where state‐led discourse has tapped into sustainability tropes to reframe the country's nat…
Sustainability Spectacle in the Gulf
The Gulf states have become home to many spectacular environmental sustainability projects, ranging from new infrastructure like solar parks and green cities to global events like the COP28 climate talks in Dubai. These projects are designed to be visually impressive and to illustrate the Gulf commitment to building a post-oil “green” future. Increasingly used to promote nationalist pride among Gulf citizens, symbols of green modernity are also u…
Scientific nationalism and museums of the future in Germany and the UAE
Geographies of nationalism
This review article considers recent scholarship on the geographies of nationalism by focusing on three key binaries that have defined the field of nationalism studies: inclusive/exclusive (geographies of community), love/hate (geographies of emotion), and past/future (geographies of time). It argues that asking who participates in constructing such conceptual dualisms, geographers can offer important insights about how nationalist discourses und…
The problem with rallying around the (Ukrainian) flag
This Provocation examines the nationalist discourse that has surrounded international reactions to the Russian invasion and war on Ukraine in 2022. It critiques the use of any kind of nationalism as a way to express solidarity because rallying around any flag is also the act of rallying around the Westphalian state system
Teaching geopolitics through sport
This paper reflects on teaching sport in political geography undergraduate courses in the United States, through which I simultaneously aim to de-essentialize geopolitics and de-essentialize sport. I integrate sport examples in diverse courses on political geography and teach a dedicated "Geopolitics of Sport" course. By framing my approach to the political geographies of sport around the specific term "geopolitics," I deliberately tap into a sen…
Free speech or obedient speech? Revisiting liberal speech norms in ‘closed contexts’
Qualitative researchers can usually discern the difference between obedient speech and fearless, critical, or oppositional speech. Yet the context in which speech acts are performed is necessarily uneven, such that the same people who might speak freely in one place are often quick to engage in obedient speech in another. Speech acts also depend on the speaker's positionality, meaning that some speakers may have the privilege to act as ‘truth‐tel…
"Revisiting "For ethnography in political geography
Event ethnography
Event ethnography is a methodological tool that involves ethnographic research on or at events. "Events" are activities, gatherings, and collective experiences that are limited in time and are highly diverse in their scope, organization, and thematic organization. Because of their temporary nature, events serve as unique venues for the convergence of actors who are usually spatially, temporally, and socially dispersed. Ethnographic research at ev…
Sustainability spectacle and 'post-oil' greening initiatives
Sustainability projects are being promoted around the world with a large dose of spectacle, including those in the Arabian Peninsula where governments have invested heavily in large greening projects and events. This article examines these spectacular projects in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which are typically dismissed by Western observers as mere PR and ‘greenwashing.’ Moving past this simplistic critique, I contextualize ‘sustainability sp…
“On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”
Spatializing Authoritarianism
Planting flags in water
In this commentary, I respond to James Riding and Carl Dahlman's article, ‘Montage space: borderlands, micronations, terra nullius, and the imperialism of the geographical imagination’. I build on their arguments about ‘more-than-dry landscapes’ to consider how the relationship between fluid and non-fluid landscapes sheds light on the construction and contestation of political space. To do so, I offer additional examples of how people plant flags…
Wastelanding Arabia
Authoritarian space-time
Desert Geopolitics
In 2014 the largest dairy company in the Middle East, Almarai, purchased a farm near Vicksburg, Arizona, to grow alfalfa as feed for cattle in Saudi Arabia. Almarai is headquartered at Al Kharj farms, just outside of Riyadh, where it has a herd of more than 93,000 milk cows. Given that dairy and alfalfa farms both require an immense amount of water to maintain, what explains these developments in the deserts of Arizona and Arabia? The answers are…
Whose apocalypse? Biosphere 2 and the spectacle of settler science in the desert
The Geopolitics of Renewables in Kazakhstan and Russia
This article examines recent renewable energy initiatives in two hydrocarbon rich states of Eurasia: Kazakhstan and Russia. The global nature of challenges surrounding energy and natural resource use demand that sustainability and “energy transition” policies be understood as geopolitical issues, which are increasingly (re)defining political relations among and within states. Existing research and media coverage of international energy politics i…
The Political Lives of Deserts
Deserts, like any geographic setting, are not sites where geopolitical dramas simply unfold or “touch down”; rather, they actively constitute geopolitical orders. This article shows how taking deserts rather than states as an entry point can provide a unique lens on geopolitics, state making, and empire. Investigating the political lives of deserts requires asking how they are imagined, narrated, and connected across space and time, and with what…
Handbook on the Changing Geographies of the State
Food as a weapon? The geopolitics of food and the Qatar–Gulf rift
On 4 June 2017, Qatar was suddenly put under an embargo by its regional neighbors – an effort spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who cut off most of its existing land, sea, and air traffic routes. With no domestic agriculture to speak of, Qatar’s external logistics networks are essential for maintaining its food supply. The country’s 2.6 million residents, many of whom flooded the grocery stores, were understandably concerned about their ab…
The Corporate Production of Nationalism
States, government officials, cultural elites, and ordinary citizens are typically the leading characters in academic treatises on nationalism—cast as the primary producers and consumers of nationalist ideology. Yet this conventional focus obscures the many corporate aspects of nationalism. Drawing from the literature on “commercial nationalism”, this article examines the corporate production of nationalism surrounding National Day holiday celebr…
Sport, statehood and transition in Europe
Why has Romania historically been home to such talented gymnasts? Lithuania to basketball players? And Albania to, well, almost no stand-out international athletic performances at all? Why have the
Resource nationalism
Although ‘resources’ and ‘nationalism’ are core analytical categories in geography, the concept of ‘resource nationalism’ has received little attention in the discipline. We address this lacuna by reviewing relevant literature across the social sciences, and tracing key concepts and scalar frames to advance a critical approach to resource nationalism. In contrast to realist approaches, we understand it as a political discourse mobilized by a wide…
Everyday Inclusions
Scholarship on Gulf Cooperative Council ( GCC ) states, which have the highest proportions of migrants in the world, usually explores how they are unique in their patterns of non‐citizen exclusion. However, state discourses, geographies, and the heterogeneity of migration to the Gulf share similar traits with contemporary nations and states. Non‐citizens are, as they are everywhere, active participants in Gulf state‐ and nation‐building projects.…
Introduction – Field methods in ‘closed contexts’
This special section on field methods in authoritarian states and places aims to move beyond the normative language of the liberal/illiberal binary by foregrounding the ways in which closure can be an authoritarian act. Illustrating the variety of scales and places at which these practices unfold, the contributors are concerned with what implications they have for conducting geographic fieldwork. The main questions raised by this set of papers ar…
The monumental and the miniature
This article examines the elite nation-building project in post-independence Kazakhstan through an analysis of monumental architecture and miniature models in Astana. It considers the role of the country's new capital as a modernist project, in which elite geopolitical imaginaries are multiply inscribed in the cityscape. Drawing on interdisciplinary literatures on modernity and authoritarian regime legitimation, the article considers modernity as…
The shifting geopolitics of higher education
Building glass refrigerators in the desert”
Planners around the Arab Gulf states are increasingly drawing on narratives about “urban sustainability,” despite the fact that the explosive growth of urban centers in the Arabian desert largely defies the logic of sustainability. In this article, I consider how and with what effect these narratives have been deployed by various actors in Doha, Qatar. Eschewing a simple economistic reading, I highlight political geographic context and analyze ho…
Is a "critical" area studies possible
At a time when nearly every topic seems to be labeled "critical" in geography, this essay asks why the discipline has lacked a clear commitment to advancing a "critical area studies" agenda. The term "critical" can take many meanings but, I argue, it has generally been an important way to "other" geography's past, including the encyclopedism of old-fashioned regional studies. With roots in the late 1980s, the idea of joining critical theory and a…
Banal Nationalism 20 years on
Why Not a World City? Astana, Ankara, and Geopolitical Scripts in Urban Networks
The world cities literature typically examines how and why certain cities achieve world city status, but this article examines why some actors eschew the world city competition and choose not to engage the discourse, despite deploying the very same urban development tactics. Through a case study of Astana, Kazakhstan's new capital city, I argue that state- and nation-building concerns in the era of independence have prevailed over interests in en…
Bordering on the modern
State‐led urban development projects, especially in non‐democratic settings, are conducive to a top–down analytic that focuses on state planners and architects. The goal of this article is to explore how we might decentre this narrative and jointly consider elite and non‐elite narratives, through an analysis of discourses of modernity as enacted in and through these statist urban projects. Deploying a practice‐based analytic, I explore how notion…
Deep Listening
The political and ethical quandaries of the "crisis of representation" that beset the social sciences from the 1980s on continue to reverberate in how geographers conduct their research today. Illustrated with two vignettes from my research in the UAE and Kazakhstan, this article explores the idea of "deep listening" as a methodological tack and mindset to guide geographic fieldwork, rooted in intellectual humility. Deep listening involves a crit…
Urban 'Utopias
This paper examines the political implications of the practice of framing mega urban development projects with the language of 'utopia' or 'Disney'. Through a case study of Kazakhstan's new capital, Astana, I argue that the stigmatizing language of 'utopia' is a highly political bordering practice, defining the 'imaginary' and the 'real.' Coupled with ethnographic data from fieldwork in Kazakhstan between 2009 and 2011, I perform a textual analys…
Orientalizing authoritarianism
Sport and soft authoritarian nation-building
Interethnic Tensions in Kyrgyzstan
Two U.S. geographers review an array of intertwining political geographic issues that provide context and set the stage for deadly armed conflict between groups of ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the southern Kyrgyzstan city of Osh in June 2010. Applying a disaggregated and localized approach to understanding the ambiguous and complex factors underlying the current instability in Kyrgyzstan, they focus on: the role of north-south political competitio…
Is nationalism just for nationals? Civic nationalism for noncitizens and celebrating National Day in Qatar and the UAE
Technologising the opinion
Focus groups, like interviews and survey research, are typically employed in liberal settings, and are often designed to reveal the ‘opinion’ of participants. However, as I argue here, the ‘opinion’ is itself a technology of government, which cannot be assumed to operate the same under different regimes of governmentality. Giving the example of my experience with focus group research in K azakhstan in autumn 2010, I demonstrate how, in many place…
Reassessing the Trump presidency, one year on
Security and gendered national identity in Uzbekistan
Contributing to the growing literature on feminist geopolitics, this article addresses the security discourses employed by the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan's post-independence nation-building process. It examines the ways in which militarism and the ‘culture of war’ are productive of gendered national identities in Uzbekistan, focusing on how the ‘protector–protected’ relationship figures prominently in the Karimov regime's anti-terrorist rhetori…
Urban boosterism in closed contexts
This paper presents a case study of urban boosterism in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan – three resource-rich states around the Caspian Sea. Boosterist projects are typically justified through the injunction of, “build it and they will come.” This cliché is a staple of how urban planners and elites seek to justify development schemes that lack an obvious demand. And while the logic underpinning urban boosterism hinges on a high degree of…
G ulf Nationalism and the Geopolitics of Constructing Falconry as a ‘Heritage Sport’
This paper illustrates how G ulf nationals' claims to their homelands are affirmed and enacted through the ostensibly banal, but highly political, effort to construct falconry as a ‘heritage sport’. Taking the case of the U nited A rab E mirates, I argue that local elites have harnessed the global discourse of ‘heritage’ to construct an ethnicized and gendered vision of a primordial A rab homeland. Heritage discourses surrounding falconry play an…
Authoritarian space-time
Green Laboratories
Like many universities in the West, universities across the Arabian Peninsula are increasingly home to various conspicuous sustainability initiatives. This article examines this trend at three of the region’s most prominent projects: NYU-Abu Dhabi in the Emirates, Qatar Foundation’s Education City, and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Based on the textual analysis and informed by fieldwork in these countries sinc…
The violence of spectacle
Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have been home to the most impressive urban development projects in the entire post-Soviet world. Their capitals, Astana and Ashgabat, now boast uniquely monumental architecture and local leaders have invested heavily in 'green belt' projects to surround the cities with lush vegetation, as well as developing green and water-laden public spaces. In doing so, elites have drawn on Soviet-era 'garden city' idealism, as wel…
The desert as laboratory
In December 2018, the University of Arizona was awarded a US$3.9 million contract from the Sultanate of Oman to develop research laboratories for the country’s “One Million Date Palms for Oman” initiative. This project is only the most recent example of a much longer set of collaborations between actors in the two regions, which began when Omani date palms were imported to the University of Arizona’s Agriculture Experiment Station in the 1890s. I…
Palgrave concise historical atlas of Central Asia
Palgrave concise historical atlas of Central Asia, by R. Abazov, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 144 pp., £14.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1403975423 An affordable atlas of Central Asia is hard to
Interethnic Tensions in Kyrgyzstan
Two U.S. geographers review an array of intertwining political geographic issues that provide context and set the stage for deadly armed conflict between groups of ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the southern Kyrgyzstan city of Osh in June 2010. Applying a disaggregated and localized approach to understanding the ambiguous and complex factors underlying the current instability in Kyrgyzstan, they focus on: the role of north-south political competitio…
The monumental and the miniature
This article examines the elite nation-building project in post-independence Kazakhstan through an analysis of monumental architecture and miniature models in Astana. It considers the role of the country's new capital as a modernist project, in which elite geopolitical imaginaries are multiply inscribed in the cityscape. Drawing on interdisciplinary literatures on modernity and authoritarian regime legitimation, the article considers modernity as…
Security and gendered national identity in Uzbekistan
Contributing to the growing literature on feminist geopolitics, this article addresses the security discourses employed by the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan's post-independence nation-building process. It examines the ways in which militarism and the ‘culture of war’ are productive of gendered national identities in Uzbekistan, focusing on how the ‘protector–protected’ relationship figures prominently in the Karimov regime's anti-terrorist rhetori…
Urban 'Utopias
This paper examines the political implications of the practice of framing mega urban development projects with the language of 'utopia' or 'Disney'. Through a case study of Kazakhstan's new capital, Astana, I argue that the stigmatizing language of 'utopia' is a highly political bordering practice, defining the 'imaginary' and the 'real.' Coupled with ethnographic data from fieldwork in Kazakhstan between 2009 and 2011, I perform a textual analys…
Why Not a World City? Astana, Ankara, and Geopolitical Scripts in Urban Networks
The world cities literature typically examines how and why certain cities achieve world city status, but this article examines why some actors eschew the world city competition and choose not to engage the discourse, despite deploying the very same urban development tactics. Through a case study of Astana, Kazakhstan's new capital city, I argue that state- and nation-building concerns in the era of independence have prevailed over interests in en…
The ‘heart’ of Eurasia? Kazakhstan's centrally located capital city
In a world still dominated by a geopolitical system of territorial states, one tool in the state- and nation-building repertoire is the strategy of moving a capital from one city to another, and to an ostensibly more ‘central’ location of a geometrically conceived territory. From Ankara to Brasília, the technique has been used in a variety of places around the world, and Kazakhstan's new capital since 1997, Astana, is one more recent iteration. T…
Bordering on the modern
State‐led urban development projects, especially in non‐democratic settings, are conducive to a top–down analytic that focuses on state planners and architects. The goal of this article is to explore how we might decentre this narrative and jointly consider elite and non‐elite narratives, through an analysis of discourses of modernity as enacted in and through these statist urban projects. Deploying a practice‐based analytic, I explore how notion…
Introduction – Field methods in ‘closed contexts’
This special section on field methods in authoritarian states and places aims to move beyond the normative language of the liberal/illiberal binary by foregrounding the ways in which closure can be an authoritarian act. Illustrating the variety of scales and places at which these practices unfold, the contributors are concerned with what implications they have for conducting geographic fieldwork. The main questions raised by this set of papers ar…
Technologising the opinion
Focus groups, like interviews and survey research, are typically employed in liberal settings, and are often designed to reveal the ‘opinion’ of participants. However, as I argue here, the ‘opinion’ is itself a technology of government, which cannot be assumed to operate the same under different regimes of governmentality. Giving the example of my experience with focus group research in K azakhstan in autumn 2010, I demonstrate how, in many place…
Kazakhstan’s changing geopolitics
A US geographer examines prevailing geopolitical discourses in Kazakhstan, through a case study of attitudes toward China and its influence in contemporary affairs. As part of a broader research project, the study draws on data from participant observation, textual analysis, interviews, focus groups, and a country-wide survey administered in Kazakhstan between June 2009 and July 2011. The author investigates the divergent findings across these me…
Technologizing complacency
Sport and soft authoritarian nation-building
Building glass refrigerators in the desert”
Planners around the Arab Gulf states are increasingly drawing on narratives about “urban sustainability,” despite the fact that the explosive growth of urban centers in the Arabian desert largely defies the logic of sustainability. In this article, I consider how and with what effect these narratives have been deployed by various actors in Doha, Qatar. Eschewing a simple economistic reading, I highlight political geographic context and analyze ho…
Globalizing Central Asia
Globalizing Central Asia is an impressively wide-ranging treatment of contemporary geopolitical and economic affairs in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan. The book is
Ethnographies of the state in Central Asia
Introduction: Performances, Possibilities, and Practices of the Political in Central Asia Johan Rasanayagam, Judith Beyer, and Madeleine Reeves Part I. Staging the Political 1. The Performance State: A Reconsideration of the Central Asian Weak John Heathershaw 2. Dialogic Authority: Kazakh Aitys Poets and Their Patrons Eva-Marie Dubuisson 3. Performing Democracy: State-Making through Patronage in Kyrgyzstan Aksana Ismailbekova 4. There is This La…
The Birth of Territory
The shifting geopolitics of higher education
Reading John Agnew and Luca Muscarà's Making Political Geography
Grounding Central Asian Geopolitics
We Entrepreneurial Academics
The global landscape of higher education has been in rapid flux, especially apparent in the recent proliferation of new universities, international partnerships, and foreign branch campuses being established in various nondemocratic states across Asia. This trend is exemplified in the Gulf Arab monarchies of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which have successfully managed to recruit Western-educated scholars to administer and staff these vario…
Urban boosterism in closed contexts
This paper presents a case study of urban boosterism in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan – three resource-rich states around the Caspian Sea. Boosterist projects are typically justified through the injunction of, “build it and they will come.” This cliché is a staple of how urban planners and elites seek to justify development schemes that lack an obvious demand. And while the logic underpinning urban boosterism hinges on a high degree of…
Everyday Inclusions
Scholarship on Gulf Cooperative Council ( GCC ) states, which have the highest proportions of migrants in the world, usually explores how they are unique in their patterns of non‐citizen exclusion. However, state discourses, geographies, and the heterogeneity of migration to the Gulf share similar traits with contemporary nations and states. Non‐citizens are, as they are everywhere, active participants in Gulf state‐ and nation‐building projects.…
G ulf Nationalism and the Geopolitics of Constructing Falconry as a ‘Heritage Sport’
This paper illustrates how G ulf nationals' claims to their homelands are affirmed and enacted through the ostensibly banal, but highly political, effort to construct falconry as a ‘heritage sport’. Taking the case of the U nited A rab E mirates, I argue that local elites have harnessed the global discourse of ‘heritage’ to construct an ethnicized and gendered vision of a primordial A rab homeland. Heritage discourses surrounding falconry play an…
Exploring divergences in comparative research
Interrogating the concept of ‘legality’ and how it relates to local citizenship regimes, this article shows how a focus on cross‐regional divergences can offer theoretical insights into the political implications of projects that, on the surface, appear to be strikingly similar. Taking the case of apparently similar spectacular capital city development schemes in the resource‐rich states of C entral A sia and the G ulf C ooperation C ouncil ( GCC…
Political science (69 works) · Politics (58 works) · Law (53 works) · Sociology (50 works) · Law (34 works) · Geography (33 works) · Geopolitics (24 works) · Economics (21 works) · History (16 works) · Political economy (16 works)