Category Archives: Current affairs

The war in Ukraine is incredibly ugly, with thousands loosing their lives as Russian forces grab more and more Ukrainian territory. In wartime, rally-around-the-flag affective waves are to be expected. People feel patriotic because their country has been attacked or … Continue reading →

I love The Irish Times. It is a paper I grew up with, a paper my father sold in our village shop in rural Ireland (after having read it himself!). What I also really like is that the paper is … Continue reading →

The decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine on 24 February 2022 has brought death and destruction to thousands of people and places, while displacing millions of innocent civilians within Ukraine and across Europe. My colleagues and I … Continue reading →

In September-October 2021 our research project on geopolitical orientations in Russia’s neighboring states and breakaway regions organized, in collaboration with ZOIS in Berlin, a computer aided telephone survey (CATI) in the contested Donbas/s region of Ukraine. Conducting research in contested … Continue reading →

2020 G. Toal, “Five ways the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will change the map.” Washington Post. 16 November. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/16/five-ways-2020-nagorno-karabakh-conflict-will-change-map/ K. Bakke, G. Toal, J. O’Loughlin, “Nagorno-Karabakh: what do residents of the contested territory want for their future?” The Conversation. 12 October. … Continue reading →

On the 6th anniversary of the horrific tragedy of the destruction of the civilian passenger aircraft Malaysian Airways Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, my colleagues and I published the results of our latest survey on blame attribution over the event … Continue reading →

The COVID crisis has upended the planned roll-out of the research results of the Geopolitical Orientations Project (see previous post from February). Fortunately we were finished the survey research process just before the crisis really hit (though we were unable … Continue reading →

Below are my currently scheduled or proposed academic conference presentations for this year (so far). Some are joint presentation with Dr John O’Loughlin, Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado-Boulder (johno@colorado.edu). Together with Dr Kristin Bakke, we’ll also be presenting … Continue reading →

Here’s a list of pieces that have appeared in 2019. All were collaborative publications this year. With over 3000 downloads so far, the Crimea paper manifestly generated the most interest. There should, consequently, be considerable interest in our forthcoming work … Continue reading →

Video of my opening keynote address “The Rise of Conspiracist Geopolitics”at the Fourth Annual Tartu Conference on Russian and East European Studies. University of Tartu, Estonia, 9 June 2019.