Gerard Toal

Toal grew up in the village of Smithborough, County Monaghan (Ulster), a few kilometers from Northern Ireland. He went to Saint Macartan's College in Monaghan. There he received a B.A. in history and geography from National University of Ireland, Maynooth with First Class Honours in 1982. Toal obtained an M.A. in Geography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and a Ph.D. in political geography from Syracuse University in 1989. John O'Loughlin in Illinois and John A. Agnew in Syracuse, were his academic advisors. Following his PhD, Toal became Assistant Professor of Geography at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, where he worked for ten years before moving to the Washington, D.C. region to establish the Government and International Affairs program in the School of Public and International Affairs.

Toal’s research specializations include critical geopolitics, nationalism, political geography, post-Communism, globalization, territorial disputes, and discourse analysis. He has published on various field research projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine. Toal has been a key figure in establishing Critical Geopolitics as a domain of research within political geography.

He is one of the contemporary geographers featured in the book Key Thinkers in Space and Place. He has authored, co-authored and/or edited eight books. His book Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal, co-authored with Dr Carl Dahlman (professor of geography at Miami University in Ohio), won the Julian Minghi Book Prize from the Political Geography Specialty Group. It examines how wartime ethnic cleansing and a post-war displaced person returns process transformed the character of three towns in Bosnia. Toal's book Near Abroad: Putin, the West, and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus (Oxford University Press, 2017) won the ENMISA Distinguished Book Award from the International Studies Association in 2019.

Toal is currently writing a book on geopolitics and climate change. Together with longtime collaborator Dr John O'Loughlin, and new collaborators Dr Kristin Bakke and Dr Marlene Laruelle, Toal also does research on the geopolitical orientations of ordinary citizens in the borderland states of the Russian Federation. This work is funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Research Council of the United Kingdom. Early results from this research project have been published in various outlets, mostly in the Monkey Cage blog on The Washington Post website. One article on public opinion in Crimea six years after annexation in Foreign Affairs generated a response from the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. Their response to his article justifies their research and ends: "Democratic societies are stronger when they recognize the merits of scientific research, no matter how inconvenient the truths the research may reveal."

In the past Toal served as an associate editor for the academic journals Geopolitics and Eurasian Geography and Economics. He currently serves on the editorial board of Political Geography Eurasian Geography and Economics and Nationalities Papers.

Toal has held fellowships at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, and the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. In 2005 he testified before the United States Congress on political developments in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Toal lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and two daughters.

• G. Toal, Near Abroad: Putin, the West, and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus Oxford University Press, 2017.
• G. Toal, C. Dahlman, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal. Oxford University Press, 2011.
• G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge, The Geopolitics Reader. Second edition. Routledge, 2006.
• J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal, eds. A Companion to Political Geography. Blackwell, 2004.
• S. Dalby and G. Ó Tuathail, eds., Rethinking Geopolitics. Routledge, 1998.
• G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge, The Geopolitics Reader. First edition. Routledge, 1998.
• A. Herod, G. Ó Tuathail and S. Roberts, eds. An Unruly World? Geography, Globalization and Governance. Routledge, 1998.
• G. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Volume 6 in the Borderlines series) and London: Routledge, 1996.

• Hague, Euan (2004): Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Gerard Toal) in: Hubbard, Phil, Rob Kitchin and Gill Valentine (Eds.): Key thinkers on space and place. London: Sage Pubn Inc. pp. 226–230.
• Louis, Florian (2014). La géopolitique critique (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) in: Les grands théoriciens de la géopolitique. Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 2014, pp. 179-188.

• Gerard Toal's blog