The Department of Geography Presents: The Inaugural Alexander B. Murphy Distinguished Geography Lectureship

“Authoritarian Developmentalism and Urban Techno-Futures in the Gulf” Lecture by Natalie Koch, Syracuse University Department of Geography and the Environment

Authoritarian developmentalism draws its strength from political narratives about “progress” and techno-optimistic stories about the future. Through a case study of Arabia and the UAE, this talk examines how authoritarian developmentalism works alongside the technology sector today. It shows how authoritarian leaders draw on established patterns of state-backed urban boosterism, but with additional support of the tech industry, which also benefits from their new investments in “innovation economies,” “start-up cities,” and the latest digital technologies like artificial intelligence.

Natalie Koch is Professor of Geography at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. 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 has published extensively in journals such as Political Geography, Geoforum, Geopolitics, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and she is editor of several books, including The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography (Wiley 2025) and Spatializing Authoritarianism (Syracuse University Press 2022). Her monographs include Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (Verso 2022), and The Geopolitics of Spectacle: Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia (Cornell University Press 2018).

Free and open to the public.