About this Event
Natalie Koch, Institute of Geography, Heidelberg University
Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) are government-owned funds that pool a country’s wealth, typically from selling natural resources like oil, and are charged with investing it for future generations. The Norway Government Pension Fund is the largest and best-known SWF, but most are controlled by nondemocratic states in the Middle East and Asia, where they have exploded in size and popularity in the last 20 years. SWFs appeal to authoritarian regimes because they are not subject to the same transparency and reporting rules as other major global investors, but the unique future-orientation built into SWFs’ story of resource nationalism explains why they are found almost exclusively in developmental states. Authoritarian developmentalism is well-known to justify nondemocratic political relations through particular future imaginaries. In colonizing “time’s indeterminacy and openness” (Buck-Morss 2000), the future becomes a technology of government. Despite the flurry of attention to authoritarian developmentalism in the late 1990s and early 2000s, scholars have not kept up with how such regimes are technologizing the future in new ways through mobilizing SWFs. This talk extends the research on developmental futurity by analyzing how local leaders use SWFs in United Arab Emirates, where I have conducted research for the past 10 years. I show how political and economic elites use SWFs as a political technology, mobilized to both to colonize the revenue extracted from the state’s sovereign space and to colonize the future with their authoritarian visions of progress and modernity. The Emirati example, I argue, offers insights into how authoritarian regime durability today is increasingly tied to new technologies of colonizing the future.
Speaker's bio:
Natalie Koch is currently Professor of Human Geography at Heidelberg University. She is a political geographer who works on geopolitics, authoritarianism, identity politics, and state power in hydrocarbon-rich countries, primarily in the Arabian Peninsula. She is author of The geopolitics of spectacle: Space, synecdoche, and the new capitals of Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018) and Arid empire: The entangled fates of Arizona and Arabia (Verso, 2023), and editor of Spatializing authoritarianism (Syracuse University Press 2022).
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Muirhead Tower Room 417, Ring Road North, Birmingham, United Kingdom
USD 0.00