Gerard Toal

Gerard Toal
Virginia Tech | VT · School of Public and International Affairs

Ph D

About

186
Publications
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Publications

Publications (186)
Article
Full-text available
The commentaries on my essay reveal the culture of debate on the Russia-Ukraine war. They also provide some evidence for the argument I sought to make. In this response I contextualize the original essay, sharpen its political implications, and engaging the commentaries. I conclude by addressing Ukraine’s seizure of Russian territory which reveals...
Chapter
Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe discusses how geopolitics affects climate change by highlighting its catastrophic effects. Even though states would prefer to reduce emissions in the abstract, they would always prioritize access to carbon-based fuels necessary for generating economic growth to compete with rival...
Chapter
Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe discusses how geopolitics affects climate change by highlighting its catastrophic effects. Even though states would prefer to reduce emissions in the abstract, they would always prioritize access to carbon-based fuels necessary for generating economic growth to compete with rival...
Chapter
Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe discusses how geopolitics affects climate change by highlighting its catastrophic effects. Even though states would prefer to reduce emissions in the abstract, they would always prioritize access to carbon-based fuels necessary for generating economic growth to compete with rival...
Chapter
Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe discusses how geopolitics affects climate change by highlighting its catastrophic effects. Even though states would prefer to reduce emissions in the abstract, they would always prioritize access to carbon-based fuels necessary for generating economic growth to compete with rival...
Chapter
Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe discusses how geopolitics affects climate change by highlighting its catastrophic effects. Even though states would prefer to reduce emissions in the abstract, they would always prioritize access to carbon-based fuels necessary for generating economic growth to compete with rival...
Chapter
Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe discusses how geopolitics affects climate change by highlighting its catastrophic effects. Even though states would prefer to reduce emissions in the abstract, they would always prioritize access to carbon-based fuels necessary for generating economic growth to compete with rival...
Chapter
Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe discusses how geopolitics affects climate change by highlighting its catastrophic effects. Even though states would prefer to reduce emissions in the abstract, they would always prioritize access to carbon-based fuels necessary for generating economic growth to compete with rival...
Chapter
Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe discusses how geopolitics affects climate change by highlighting its catastrophic effects. Even though states would prefer to reduce emissions in the abstract, they would always prioritize access to carbon-based fuels necessary for generating economic growth to compete with rival...
Chapter
Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe discusses how geopolitics affects climate change by highlighting its catastrophic effects. Even though states would prefer to reduce emissions in the abstract, they would always prioritize access to carbon-based fuels necessary for generating economic growth to compete with rival...
Chapter
Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe discusses how geopolitics affects climate change by highlighting its catastrophic effects. Even though states would prefer to reduce emissions in the abstract, they would always prioritize access to carbon-based fuels necessary for generating economic growth to compete with rival...
Chapter
Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe discusses how geopolitics affects climate change by highlighting its catastrophic effects. Even though states would prefer to reduce emissions in the abstract, they would always prioritize access to carbon-based fuels necessary for generating economic growth to compete with rival...
Article
Full-text available
Despite severe and mounting war costs, many in the international coalition supporting Ukraine have publicly expressed strong aversion to negotiations with Russia, and Ukrainian territorial concessions, to end the war. What explains this aversion to negotiations and seeming taboo on territorial concessions? This commentary, drawing particularly on U...
Book
Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe discusses how geopolitics affects climate change by highlighting its catastrophic effects. Even though states would prefer to reduce emissions in the abstract, they would always prioritize access to carbon-based fuels necessary for generating economic growth to compete with rival...
Article
Full-text available
The purpose of this study is to advance our understanding of how exposure to war-related violence can affect civilians’ willingness to support peace negotiations. We surveyed 1,812 people in three eastern cities of war-torn Ukraine to examine how different forms of loss during war influenced people’s support for peace agreements and how the mechani...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Collecting public opinion data is challenging in the shadow of war. And yet accurate public opinion is crucial. Political elites rely on it and often attempt to influence it. Therefore, it is incumbent on researchers to provide independent and reliable wartime polls. However, surveying in wartime presents a distinctive set of challenges. We outline...
Article
Full-text available
Examining geopolitical orientations in a representative survey of Belarus in early 2020, we adopt a critical geopolitical perspective that highlights geopolitical cultures as fields of contestation and debate over a state’s identity, orientation, and enduring interests. We examine support among 1210 Belarusians to four foreign policy options for th...
Article
Full-text available
This paper analyzes responses to geopolitical orientation questions in a survey of Belarus residents in early 2020, just months before the political crises that erupted later in the year. We adopt a critical geopolitical perspective that highlights geopolitical cultures as fields of contestation and debate over a state’s identity, orientation and e...
Article
Full-text available
The book Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space was first published twenty-five years ago. In this article, I briefly discuss the geopolitical and intellectual sources of inspiration for the development Critical Geopolitics as a distinctive approach within Anglo-American political geography. In doing so, I distinguish it from ot...
Article
Full-text available
In 2014, Ukraine descended into war. The geographically delimited nature of the war in Ukraine, confined to two eastern oblasts, raises the questions of whether war changes geopolitical attitudes in regions proximate to the fighting. Using attitudinal surveys with similar questions in April and December 2014 in the contested territory of southeaste...
Article
Full-text available
The widespread international condemnation of the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014 is at odds with the strong local support for the transfer of territory in the peninsula. Though regarded as illegitimate by most governments as indicated in a UN General Assembly vote, the Russian government argued that the transfer was justified since it...
Article
Full-text available
Borderization refers to the construction of physical barriers to transform a territorial ceasefire line into an international border. The term was used first by European Union officials to refer to the administrative boundary line between Georgia and de facto state of South Ossetia. The article analyses how physical border construction in this area...
Article
Full-text available
Shock events are often pivotal moments in geopolitics and objects of intense disagreement among conflicting parties. This paper examines the downing of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over eastern Ukraine in July 2014 and the divergent blame storylines produced on Russian and Ukrainian television about the event. It then examines results of a que...
Article
Full-text available
Post-war state-building is fraught with challenges as “war-makers” pivot to become “state-makers.” Citizen assessments of public good provision and physical security provide a measure of how state-building is perceived internally. State-building may also necessitate external dependence (Russia, for example, provides significant financial and milita...
Chapter
On my third evening in Russia, the world changed. I was in Stavropol, a city founded by Prince Gregory Potemkin at the time of the American Revolution as one of ten fortresses to defend the borders of the expanding Russian Empire. To the south were the Caucasus, formidable mountains and myriad peoples. Stavropol grew as an administrative center of...
Chapter
When U.S. President George W. Bush first met Russian president Vladimir Putin, he praised him as “an honest, straightforward man who loves his country.” Bush indicated that, more than a decade after the Cold War ended, it was “time to move beyond suspicion and towards straight talk.” Thereafter, both presidents established a good working relationsh...
Chapter
On November 24, 2015, a Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M aircraft on the Syria-Turkey border. For seventeen seconds the Russian aircraft crossed the southern tip of a salient of Turkish territory that Syria claimed rightfully belonged to it. Two Russians ejected from the plane over Syria. A local Turkmen militia, commanded...
Chapter
On April 25, 2005, President Vladimir Putin addressed the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. In his lengthy speech Putin laid out a series of priorities for the Russian state in the coming decade. These priorities were not new—he had spoken about them in a similar address the year before—and their central aim was well known, “to build,” as...
Chapter
In breaking apart a sovereign territorial state, it is helpful, if not always necessary, to have an alternative geopolitical imaginary at the ready and for this ersatz replacement to have some degree of local credibility and support. When Putin decided to annex Crimea, the move was intuitively presented as a historic Russian territory rejoining the...
Chapter
The Georgian Military Assault on Tskhinval(i) began with an artillery barrage by truck-mounted Grad missiles that rained down in a largely indiscriminate manner on the urban area. OSCE monitors in the city counted rounds exploding at intervals of fifteen to twenty seconds. Then Georgian forces began a ground offensive. Scores were killed, mostly ci...
Chapter
In December 2007, Damon wilson returned to the White House to take a position as senior director for Europe in the National Security Council of George W. Bush. Having spent the previous year in Iraq, Wilson was back working on an issue he was passionate about: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) enlargement. Prior service in the State Departm...
Chapter
It was supposed to be China’s coming-out party, a moment in the global spotlight affirming its arrival as an economic superpower. But hours before the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, news of a war in the Caucasus flashed across the world’s TV screens. On the southern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains, the state of Georgia launched a...
Book
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, it invaded Georgia. Both states are part of Russia's "near abroad" - newly independent states that were once part of the Soviet Union and are now Russia's neighbors. While the Russia-Georgia war of 2008 faded from the headlines in the wake of the global recession, the geopolitical contest that created it did not. Six...
Chapter
On the Evening of August 7, 2008, Inal Pliyev was working late at his office in the center of Tskhinval(i). A former journalist, Pliyev was head of communications for the self-declared South Ossetian Republic. Earlier in the evening, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili had declared a unilateral ceasefire after days of skirmishes between Georgian...
Article
Full-text available
The concept of the Russian world (Russkii mir) re-entered geopolitical discourse after the end of the Soviet Union. Though it has long historical roots, the practical definition and geopolitical framing of the term has been debated and refined in Russian political and cultural circles during the years of the Putin presidency. Having both linguistic...
Book
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, it invaded Georgia. Both states are part of Russia's "near abroad" - newly independent states that were once part of the Soviet Union and are now Russia's neighbors. While the Russia-Georgia war of 2008 faded from the headlines in the wake of the global recession, the geopolitical contest that created it did not. Six...
Article
Full-text available
The concept of the Russian world (Russkii mir) re-entered geopolitical discourse after the end of the Soviet Union. Though it has long historical roots, the practical definition and geopolitical framing of the term has been debated and refined in Russian political and cultural circles during the years of the Putin presidency. Having both linguistic...
Article
Full-text available
In the spring of 2014, some anti-Maidan protestors in southeast Ukraine, in alliance with activists from Russia, agitated for the creation of a large separatist entity on Ukrainian territory. These efforts sought to revive a historic region called Novorossiya (“New Russia”) on the northern shores of the Black Sea that was created by Russian imperia...
Article
Full-text available
In the wake of the Ukrainian crisis in 2013-2014, renewed attention has been given to the earlier so-called “frozen conflicts” of the successor states of the Soviet Union. In Georgia, Moldova, and Azerbaijan, national conflicts of the early 1990s resulted in establishment of four breakaway regions, the de facto states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Tr...
Article
Full-text available
The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, to solve a problem, to point someone in the right direction. Maps shape and communicate information, for the sake of improved orientation. But maps exist for states as well as individuals, and they need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge, as Steven Seegel makes clear...
Article
Full-text available
In July 1990 the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) was founded in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Within six months the party would become the dominant political party among the Serb population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. How did it accomplish this? Taking issue with two existing explanations of SDS and the 1990 election campaign, underbidding and vagueness, this paper d...
Article
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De facto states, functional on the ground but unrecognized by most states, have long been black boxes for systematic empirical research. This study investigates de facto states’ internal legitimacy—people's confidence in the entity itself, the regime, and institutions. While internal legitimacy is important for any state, it is particularly importa...
Article
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Discussions of the territorial conflict over Nagorny Karabakh often fail to convey the multiple political geographies at play in the dispute. This paper outlines six distinct political geographies—territorial regimes and geographical imaginations—that are important in understanding Armenian perspectives on the conflict only (Azerbaijani perspective...
Article
Cartographic representations of Nagorno-Karabakh both illustrate and aggravate the territorial conflict in the Caucasus. At the same time, Armenian geopolitical culture faces internal tensions over how to represent Karabakh and its surrounding territories.
Article
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Has 20 years of separation between the Republics of Moldova and Pridnestrovie (Transnistria, PMR) generated a division in attitudes and beliefs in the two populations? Using near-simultaneous social scientific surveys from the summer of 2010 in the two republics, we measured four localized geopolitical divides: the local economies, historical memor...
Article
Full-text available
South Ossetia was the main site of the August 2008 war between Georgian military forces, local South Ossetian forces, and the Russian military. Soon thereafter, the Russian Federation recognized the territory as a state, the South Ossetian Republic. This article reviews the contending scripts used to understand South Ossetia and the basis of its cl...
Article
Full-text available
The theory and practice of referenda played an important role in the break-up of Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), where two divisive referenda preceded the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. After the failure of constitutional reforms in April 2006, Milorad Dodik, then Republika Srpska's prime minister, suggested that Republika Srpska had...
Article
The paper combines the results of two nearly simultaneous surveys in 2010 to provide a unique, rather comprehensive picture of the attitudes of (a) current residents of Abkhazia and (b) largely ethnic Georgian former residents of Abkhazia now living in forced displacement in Georgia following the 1992-1993 war. More specifically, it probes the view...
Article
Full-text available
Two U.S.-based political geographers survey the current state of affairs in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), characterized by increasing political tensions between its two constituent entities—the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republika Srpska (RS). The authors examine ways in which recurrent calls for a referendum on RS's self-determination/indepe...
Article
This book is an authoritative account of ethnic cleansing and its partial undoing in the Bosnian wars from 1990 to the present. The book combines a bird's-eye view of the entire war from onset to aftermath with a micro-level account of three towns that underwent ethnic cleansing and later the return of refugees. Through the lens of critical geopoli...
Chapter
This chapter reflects on the legacies of the double effort to remake Bosnia-Herzegovina since 1990 and outlines a qualified answer to the question of whether ethnic cleansing succeeded or not. Perhaps the most appropriate answer to whether ethnic cleansing has succeeded in Bosnia is that it is too early to tell. If Bosnia-Herzegovina is allowed to...
Article
Full-text available
Testing claims about a region often glibly described by outsiders, thus checking assumptions upon which policy recommendations are based, this article examines residents' attitudes in the de facto state of Abkhazia. The results of a nationally representative social scientific survey in Abkhazia in March 2010 are presented in five themes-security an...
Article
Critical geopolitics began as a critique of Cold War geopolitical discourses that imposed homogenizing categories upon diverse regional conflicts and marginalized place-specific structural causes of instability and violence. This critique is still relevant. Implicit within it is the promise of a more geographical geopolitics that, arguably, has not...
Article
Full-text available
Ethnic cleansing is a violent geopolitical practice designed to separate and segregate ethnic groups. This article describes both the war aims that justified ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the efforts by the international community to enable victims of ethnic cleansing to return to their homes. It considers the trends and geography of p...
Article
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Abstract A tenet of modern,studies of nationalism is thatmobilized,nations will want,to live separately from members,of other groups,to achieve,ethno-territorial goals. A comparison,of attitudes to a question on preferences for ethnic separatism for two zones of conflict, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the North Caucasus,of Russia reveals large differences...
Article
The aftermaths of terrorist spectacles are intensely consequential moments in the making of geopolitical meaning. This paper develops a critical geopolitical account of the ways in which key actors involved in the terrorist incident at School Number 1 in Beslan North Ossetia constructed its meaning and justified their actions. The event is examined...
Article
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A noted political geographer presents an analysis of the August 2008 South Ossetian war. He analyzes the conflict from a critical geopolitical perspective sensitive to the importance of localized context and agency in world affairs and to the limitations of state-centric logics in capturing the connectivities, flows, and attachments that transcend...
Article
This review critiques Afflicted Powers on three fronts: a flawed conception of politics as spectacle, an overly functionalist account of the Iraq war, and base determinism in its reasoning about American foreign policy.
Article
A Russian and a U.S.-based political geographer explore how geopolitical cultures and traditions function in imagining and discursively framing events in specific regions within a particular state. More specifically, this paper undertakes a focused examination of competing elite storylines in Russian geopolitical culture about the North Caucasus du...

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