Bettina Koch

Bettina Koch is Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She has published widely on political theory and the history of Western and non-Western political thought. Her work focuses on issues related to the interaction of politics and religion, political violence in transcultural comparison, the concept of terrorism as a topic in political theory, state decline and failure, mass surveillance, and state terrorism. Her most recent monograph...See more

Bettina Koch is Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She has published widely on political theory and the history of Western and non-Western political thought. Her work focuses on issues related to the interaction of politics and religion, political violence in transcultural comparison, the concept of terrorism as a topic in political theory, state decline and failure, mass surveillance, and state terrorism. Her most recent monograph is Patterns Legitimizing Political Violence in Transcultural Perspectives: Islamic and Christian Traditions and Legacies (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2015; paperback 2016). She is editor of the volume State Terror, State Violence - Global Perspectives (Springer: Wiesbaden, 2016) and co-editor (with Cary J. Nederman) of Inventing Modernity in Medieval European Thought, c. 1100 - c. 1550 (Medieval Institute Publications, 2018). In 2016/17 she was Caltech-Huntington Humanities Collaborations Fellow, California Institute of Technology and Huntington Library and Caltech Visiting Associate in the Humanities, California Institute of Technology. See less