Oceans Rise and Empires Fall

In Conversation with Dr. Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail)
Date
Dec 2, 2024, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
Location
Robertson Hall 023
Audience
Open to the Public

Speaker

Details

Event Description

It is the decisive decade for climate change action, yet great power competition is surging. Geo-economic rivalries and territorial conflicts over Ukraine and Taiwan appear more important than collective action against catastrophic climate change. Why do great powers favor competition and rivalry over transnational policies to address the greatest threat humanity has ever faced?

In Oceans Rise Empires Fall, Gerard Toal identifies geopolitics as the culprit. Examining its meaning, history, and leading thinkers, he exposes the geo-ecological foundations of geopolitics and the struggles for living space that it expresses. The book isolates three Earth-controlling practices that characterize geopolitics. The territorial control imperatives of great powers preclude collaborative behavior to address common challenges. Competing world historical missions drive rivalries and wars, like Russia's fossil-fuel-funded aggression against Ukraine. Military-industrial competition over leading edge technologies and critical minerals takes priority over collaborative decarbonization policies. In the contest between geopolitics and sustainable climate policies, the former takes precedence—especially when competition shifts to outright conflict. In this book, Toal interrogates that relationship and its stakes for the ongoing acceleration of climate change.

Oceans Rise Empires Fall Book cover

About the Speaker: 

Dr. Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) is Professor of Government and International Affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech’s campus in Arlington, Virginia. Dr. Toal is the author of numerous books, including Near Abroad (Oxford), Bosnia Remade (Oxford, co-authored) and Critical Geopolitics (Minnesota). He has also written many articles about the intersection of geopolitics and post-communist territorial conflict. He lives in Northwest Washington DC with his wife and two daughters. For the past two decades, he has been playing football (the real foot-and-ball kind) with a bunch of friends on the National Mall, forever in search of the perfect goal.

Sponsor
CISS
Contact
Brian Lee