Author Meets Critics on Margarita Balmaceda’s "Russian Energy Chains" (Virtual Session)

Session Submission Type: Virtual Author meet critics

Session Description

Scholars have often asked: how has Russia used energy as threat against post-Soviet states such as Ukraine? We cannot understand this threat, however, without also understanding the opportunity Russian energy also meant for many within these states, benefits acquired through participation in the value chains of Russian energy exports. It is this tension between energy threat and temptation, opportunity and risk, in the arch between Vladivostok and Brussels that creates the puzzle that Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union (Columbia U. Press, 2021) seeks to solve. To do this, the book follows Russia’s three largest fossil fuel exports—natural gas, oil, and coal—from production in Siberia through transportation via Ukraine to final use in Germany. More specifically, the book seeks to answer two questions: (1) How have these value chains affected post-Soviet power relations and Russia’s ability to use energy as means of leverage? (2) How has their impact been different for different types of energy? These two questions shed light on a key political science question: How can natural resources be used as means of domestic and international power? Energy technology plays a key role—to reach consumers in the EU, oil, natural gas, and coal from Russia must not only travel thousands of miles and be transported through various states but must also go through a series of production processes closely related to the physical characteristics of each energy type itself.
Two key conceptual contributions of the book involve the use of a entire value-chain approach to analyze energy politics, and the focus on the impact of the distinct materiality of various energy goods. In the argument presented, the physical characteristics of different types of energy, by affecting how can it be transported, distributed, and even stolen, will also affect what various actors may be able to do with it – not only in terms of extracting heating, calories, or profits, but also including its possible use as a political weapon. By introducing the concept of commercial and regulatory nodes as no less impactful than traditionally-conceptualized physical nodes, the book also challenges conventional perceptions of energy flow space as a linear.
This “Author meets critics” panel brings together four nuanced analysts of energy and international relations in the former Soviet area to offer their critiques to the book as well as related work-in-progress. The author will briefly summarize the book’s main arguments and discuss work-in-progress extensions, in particular on energy-industrial chains and decarbonization inspired by chapter 6, “Managing Subsidies: Coal from Kuzbass to Ukraine’s Metallurgical Complex in the Donbas to Germany.” Each of the panelists will critique the book from the perspective of their own research and methodological tradition. Boris Barkanov (West Virginia University) has written extensively on Russian-EU energy relations and the role of international regimes in these. Using both hegemonic theory and constructivist-inspired understandings of elite identity to analyze Russia’s rocky relationship with the Energy Charter Treaty as an international regime, his perspective provides an important vintage point to assess Russian Energy Chains’ take on Russian-EU energy relations, as well as on the role of physical, commercial and regulatory nodes in these. Yann Breault (Royal Military College of St-Jean, Quebec) focuses on the geopolitics of the post-Cold War era. His numerous publications on Ukraine’s security and political relations with Russia and the West give him a unique vintage point to assess the geopolitical implications of the arguments made in Russian Energy Chains about the triangular energy links involving Ukraine, Russia and the EU. Allison Evans (University of Nevada, Reno), using sub-national and national comparative methods, has done detailed work on the linkage between local politics in Siberian oil production sites and global trade in oil, as well as on extractive industry-related company towns and labor militancy in Russia, Kazakhstan and South Africa. With expertise branching out of fossil fuels and into other strategic resources such as platinum, she is well suited to assess the book’s claim about the impact of differences between different energy goods. Adam Stulberg’s (Georgia Tech) research is at the intersection of energy, strategic, and economic statecraft. He is the author of, among other books, Well-oiled Diplomacy: Strategic Manipulation and Russia’s Energy Statecraft in Eurasia. Shedding light on different strategic outcomes for Russia in oil and natural gas negotiations with Caspian and Central Asian states, this book gives him a unique perspective from which to assess the argument made in Russian Energy Chains about the impact of materiality differences between of different energy goods on the way they may be used as by different actors.

Sub Unit

• Division 13: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Chair

• Margarita M. Balmaceda Harvard University

Presenters

• Boris Barkanov West Virginia University

• Allison D. Evans University of Nevada, Reno

• Adam N. Stulberg Georgia Institute of Technology

• Yann Breault Royal Military College Saint-Jean