Gerard Toal


Gerard Toal is Professor of Government and International Affairs, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, National Capital Region campus, 900 North Glebe Road, Arlington.

Life and scientific work

Toal grew up in the village of Smithborough, County Monaghan, a few miles from the border with Northern Ireland. He attended secondary school and then university. In 1982 he received a First Class Honours B.A. in History and Geography from National University of Ireland, Maynooth. 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
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, 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 won the from the International Studies Association in 2019. He is currently working on a book entitled Oceans Rise, Empires Fall that presents a critical framework for analyzing geopolitics amidst a deepening planetary climate emergency.
Together with longtime collaborator Dr John O'Loughlin, and new collaborators Dr Kristin Bakke and Dr Marlene Laruelle, Toal also currently researches the geopolitical orientations of ordinary citizens in the borderland states of the Russian Federation. This work is 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 in Foreign Affairs generated . 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." The team have also reported on .
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, Nationalities Papers and Communist and Post-Communist Studies.
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.

Selected books