We will dig into this with featured speaker Gerard Toal, professor of international affairs at Virginia Tech. This discussion provides a thick geopolitical description of the Ukraine crisis and illustrates how it is a multiscalar conflict that entangles low intensity war in the Donbas, national identity conflict between Kyiv and Moscow, energy infrastructure and climate, as well as great power perceptions of geo-strategic encroachment. Toal will offer some arguments as to why Russia's leadership decided to initiate the threat of invasion now, and what are its likely consequences.
Join us Wednesday, March 2 from 3:30-5:00 p.m. EST for this virtual discussion. Register below.
This event is being recorded and may be posted to our YouTube channel. If you choose to participate in discussion, you are presumed to consent to the use of your comments and potentially your image in these recordings. If you do not wish to be recorded, please contact Kelly Whitaker (whitaker.285@osu.edu).
If you require an accommodation such as live captioning or interpretation to participate in this event, please contact Kyle McCray, mccray.44@osu.edu. Requests made two weeks before the event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.
Speaker
Dr. Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) is a Political Geographer and a founding figure in the creation of Critical Geopolitics. A Professor of International Affairs at Virginia Tech’s greater Washington area campus, he is the recipient of multiple research grants from the US National Science Foundation (NSF). His last book Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest for Ukraine and the Caucasus won the International Studies Association’s ENMIA Distinguished Book Award in 2019. He is currently completing the book manuscript Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Theorizing Geopolitics on an Earth in Crisis.
