Natalie Koch

• PhD
• Professor at Syracuse University

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...

In February 1956, several years after the death of Stalin, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave his famous Secret Speech, “On the cult of personality and its consequences.” In the speech, Khrushchev broke a taboo of silence about the brutality of Stalin’s regime, including years of bloody purges, and scorned the leader’s infatuation with himself. T...

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. Incre...

This chapter introduces the second edition of the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography , which represents a fresh look at the subdiscipline of political geography and how it can be mobilized to investigate, interpret, and understand our changing world. While global events and politics have been transformed in the 10 years since the firs...

Power shapes political geographies in profound ways, but for much of the history of political geography as a subdiscipline it has remained an unexamined concept. Since the early 2000s, however, power has become an increasingly important focus of theorization. This chapter introduces the main conceptual discussions about power that have been importa...

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 ill...

Horticultural Expos are second-tier expositions sanctioned by the Bureau International Des Expositions (BIE) and the latest event was held in Doha, Qatar from October 2023 to March 2024. Organized around the theme of “Green Desert, Better Environment,” Expo 2023 included pavilions from about 80 countries and organizations, and aimed to entice 3 mil...

AgTech investments in the Gulf are primarily driven by economic development rather than genuine concerns over food security. While marketed as food security solutions, these projects focus on attracting foreign investment and expertise, bolstering local entrepreneurship, and enhancing economic competitiveness.

Nationalist visions of the future are articulated through the language and logic of science. This article extends political geography research on the future by examining “scientific nationalism” expressed at two museums of the future in Germany and the UAE: Berlin’s Futurium and Dubai’s Museum of the Future. The techno-science ideals narrated in th...

All nationalisms have multiple storylines that evolve in response to changes in global affairs. The shifting geopoliti-cal 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 th...

Review forum of "Arid empire: The entangled fates of Arizona and Arabia"

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...

The environment poses a number of policy issues for any regime, including questions related to pollution and climate change, the scope and spatial extent of environmental protection, how natural resources can and should be extracted, investment in the “green economy” and other sustainability policies, how to manage or preempt environment-related pr...

https://aspeniaonline.it/gulf-sport-geopolitics-and-western-cultural-hegemony/ This essay argues that Western anxieties about Gulf investment in global sport reflect a mismatch between an idealized vision of sport as a tool of cultural diplomacy and the reality of how it operates as a tool of Western cultural hegemony. Viewed through the lens of cu...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

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.

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...

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...

Dairy products seemed to gain a new political significance in the Arabian Peninsula in June 2017, when Qatar was suddenly placed under an air, land, and sea embargo by its Gulf neighbours. While the country’s entire food supply chain were affected, residents in Qatar were especially concerned with their access to dairy products because they were ke...

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 suc...

The iconic deserts of the American southwest could not have been colonized and settled without the help of desert experts from the Middle East. For example: In 1856, a caravan of thirty-three camels arrived in Indianola, Texas, led by a Syrian cameleer the Americans called "Hi Jolly." This "camel corps," the US government hoped, could help the army...

This paper examines the recent interest in hydrogen energy among political and economic leaders in the oil and gas producing states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Although key stakeholders continue to reinforce the fossil fuel systems that have defined the region’s political economy for decades, they increasingly recognize that the hydrocar...

This article examines the role of “oil money” in promoting the energy transition, tracing activities across the oil industry and countries heavily dependent on oil revenues to bolster their green credentials. Through a case study of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), I argue that financial sustainability is paramount in places and institutions that fe...

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...

In the late 1930s, the American oil company Aramco helped Saudi Arabia's King Ibn Saud develop his royal farm outside Riyadh. On the king's request, Aramco introduced new technology to tap the Al Kharj region's rich aquifer water and establish vast fields of wheat, alfalfa, and other water-intensive crops. Saudi Arabia's aquifers have since been pu...

Authoritarianism has emerged as a prominent theme in popular and academic discussions of politics since the 2016 US presidential election and the coinciding expansion of authoritarian rhetoric and ideals across Europe, Asia, and beyond. Until recently, however, academic geographers have not focused squarely on the concept of authoritarianism. Its l...

The Arabian Peninsula has hosted an array of major sporting events in recent years, including high-profile events in tennis, cycling, sailing, golf, polo, horse racing, and Formula 1 and E, the Asian Games, and the FIFA World Cup. To enable this, local leaders and their allies have transformed the urban fabric of cities like Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai,...

https://aspeniaonline.it/global-sports-and-the-gulfs-sovereign-wealth-funds/

https://aspeniaonline.it/the-gulfs-sovereign-wealth-fund-cities/

What might we consider authoritarian space-time? Authoritarianism is a political relationship defined by univocality and subordination of difference to a central authority or vision. Authoritarian space-time thus works through singularity; it collapses the multiplicity of time, space, voice, authority, and social imagination into one acceptable vis...

http://www.focusongeography.org/publications/photoessays/uae/index.html

This chapter examines the social and political complexities of spectacular city-building in Central Asia. Rather than fixating on elite “mastermind” schemes, however, we emphasize the theoretical and empirical value of a “bottom-up” view of on grand urban development projects in the region. Drawing from our ethnographic research in Astana (recently...

Deserts have a special prominence in apocalyptic visions of the future. As a trope, the desert frequently indexes apocalyptic visions of the warming planet and future challenges of securing food, energy, and water in a changing environment. This article considers how diffuse visions of "environmental apocalypse" are spun through narratives construc...

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 da...

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...

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 mill...

Originally published as: Koch, Natalie. 2020. Deep Listening: Practicing Intellectual Humility in Geographic Fieldwork. Geographical Review 110 (1-2): 52-64. 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 toda...

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...

Book Introduction

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 mi...

'AgTech' is the latest discourse about introducing new technologies to agricultural production. Researchers, corporations, and governments around the world are investing heavily in supporting its development. Abu Dhabi, the largest and wealthiest emirate in the UAE, has been among these supporters, recently announcing a massive scheme to support Ag...

American university globalization has increasingly targeted and been courted by authoritarian states. While the reasons for these partnerships are manifold—including the ease of top-down large-scale monetary investment, “knowledge economy” development strategies, social engineering programs, and other corporate and imperial entanglements—an overwhe...

[N]ew forms of governance in the Gulf work through identity projects that include (and often co-opt) difference to gain legitimacy.

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”, t...

The names of two major Gulf airlines, Qatar Airways and Emirates, have saturated the European football scene for many years, sponsoring some of the most prominent European teams and FIFA itself. These state-backed airlines are also active in motorsports, rugby, cycling, tennis, golf, cricket, and equestrian sport, while several prominent Gulf elite...

This article examines a dominant vision in contemporary geopolitics, in which the world is imagined as divided between liberal and illiberal political systems, clustering around the two conceptual nodes of "democracy" and "authoritarianism". It considers how these conceptual nodes are imagined, mapped, and brought to life through writing, policies,...

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 nationali...

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 relati...

Review of "Urban geopolitics: Rethinking planning in contested cities"

State leaders in the Arabian Peninsula have increasingly sought to host globalized sporting events to broadcast a cosmopolitan and modern image of the region. These efforts are typically interpreted as examples of states exercising 'soft power'. This article challenges the state-centric assumptions built into the soft power approach by employing an...

Why do autocrats build spectacular new capital cities? In The Geopolitics of Spectacle, Natalie Koch considers how autocratic rulers use "spectacular" projects to shape state-society relations, but rather than focus on the standard approach—on the project itself—she considers the unspectacular "others." The contrasting views of those from the poore...

This article reviews how sport has been engaged in urban geography and related fields. Across the social sciences, there has been an explosion of research on “sporting mega-events,” such as the Olympics and FIFA World Cup. While much of this scholarship has examined the effects of these events for cities and city residents, I emphasize a longer and...

Across Eurasia, authoritarian leaders have sought to justify their 'strong-hand' approach to government by framing instability as a security threat and the strong state as a guarantor of political stability. Such 'regimes of certainty' promote a modernist valorization of order, the flip side of which is a demonization of political disorder instabil...

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 Sci...

This article examines monumental mosques and particularly those that are built to be and function more as monuments than as places for worship. We consider the role of monumentality in religious landscapes by way of six exemplary mosques in three different world regions – Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and Southeast Asia. Tracing their unique...

In 1976, Michel Foucault gave a unique interview with the editors of the French geography journal, Hérodote . The interviewers pushed him to explicitly reflect on the many spatial concepts that pervade his writing, such as region, province, field, archipelago , and territory . In one reply, Foucault explained: People have often reproached me for th...

Reviews Benjamin Smith , Market Orientalism: Cultural Economy and the Arab Gulf States (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2015). Pp. 347. $49.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780815634102

This article analyzes the role of mosques dedicated to the "father of the nation" under two personalistic authoritarian systems: Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan and Sheikh Zayed in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Critiquing "cult of personality" narratives as Orientalist and analytically weak, I emphasize the constructed nature of charisma, aski...

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...

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, whic...

This introduction considers the significance of Michael Billig's (1995) Banal Nationalism to geographers, and how this fits into broader trends of nationalism research in the social sciences. Through an analysis of Web of Science citation trends for the book, we illustrate its spatial and temporal reach in terms of the countries where it has been c...

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...

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-citi...

This paper illustrates how Gulf 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 United Arab Emirates, I argue that local elites have harnessed the global discourse of ‘heritage’ to construct an ethnicized and...

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 develop...

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 wa...

This article revisits Anssi Paasi’s concept of “spatial socialization.” The hallmark of Paasi’s geographic approach to identity, the concept offers a way to move beyond statist approaches that either reify the state or dismiss its significance. Spatial socialization sheds light on how the myths of coherence of “states,” “territories,” and otherwise...

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, Qa...

This article examines recent higher education projects in two resource-rich, developmental states: Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. These projects are indicative of broader trend across Asia to move beyond previous national universities, toward a state-initiated model of the globally competitive university, which is designed to become an regional hub f...

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...

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 implicatio...