RIP Yves Lacoste. He created the possibility of thinking critically about geopolitics, wresting it from the right.

The Reflecting Pool is ready for St Patrick’s Day, Chicago style.

This is a great book to read, especially during the World Cup.

The World Cup is a festival of nations but the identities of team players reveal remarkably complex & contingent hybridities that rebuke singular flag nationalism. www.bbc.com/sport/footba...

Abundant fossil fuel rents + oligarchy + patronal rule + imperial nationalism + malignant narcissism = Russia's war on Ukraine. Moscovites now choking on the results. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

This article, amidst MAGA overlordship, is brave, and correct. www.usni.org/magazines/pr...

Academic debates should embrace political neutrality, professional judgement and the plurality of possible interpretations. The campaign against Ivan Katchanovski does not, say Dmitry Dubrovskiy and Matthew Blackburn https://ow.ly/LRZN50Z7XQ9

"You gotta read this one Andy" Former Irish President Michael D Higgins shows a visiting Andy Burnham (Manchester mayor) and Steve Rotheram (Liverpool mayor) a copy of my book Oceans Rise Empires Fall in November 2025.

Great to speak at NUPI in Oslo yesterday on theorizing great power “territorial passions” amidst deepening climatic breakdown.

This tree is older than the United States. The Travilah Oak Tree this beautiful afternoon.

Congratulations to my colleague Chad on the birth of his first book, the product of years of archival research, thinking & writing. Very relevant to our turbulent times.

Brendan O’Leary channeling Jonathan Swift on the 10 MAGA Commandments for war against Iran. 😂 www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

RIP Patrick O’Sullivan, the London Irish political geographer (born December 1941) who taught for years at Florida State University. He wrote on military geography and other topics. His critique of domino theory reasoning was excellent and included in The Geopolitics Reader.

To my Diadoras, at their end today, for 37 years of fine service 🙏

Assigned @triofrancos.bsky.social new book in my Political Geography seminar. It’s really excellent, connecting frontier community living space struggles to clean energy corporate power & great power competition. Avoids us/them geopolitics: foregrounds an entangled global condition.

Make Great Power land grabbing great again, with (sadly) an Irish twist.

On the Irish 'gilets jaunes' road-blockage protests: "Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan suggested on Thursday that the protests were being “manipulated” by English far-right figure Tommy Robinson." www.irishtimes.com/politics/202...

Israel's destruction of villages in southern Lebanon continues apace. A forum on 'Erasure' (from ISA 2025) will appear in the Journal of Genocide Research in the next month or so.

Underexplored here is emulation, an apprentice striving to follow a master. - use state to get obscenely rich ✅ - use 'enemy within' to consolidate power ✅ - create regime oligarchs, punish real journalists ✅ - threaten neighbors, launch wars, commit war crimes ✅ www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/o...

Back in day I wrote about a US pilot shot down over Bosnia & a movie with a similar theme. The Frustrations of Geopolitics and the Pleasures of War: Behind Enemy Lines and American Geopolitical Culture: Geopolitics: Vol 10, No 2 www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Great discussion, with Mike Bradshaw (excellent person whom I haven’t seen in years) and Arthur Snell on the “geopolitics of the energy transition” or, if you want to sex it up, on “metabolic geopolitics.” podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Immerwahr's argument here is very interesting. Trump's geopolitics has: - No animating civilizing mission (not 'classic imperialism') - No chess game strategic vision - No 'burden of empire' Its about gratuitous violent domination, unrestrained war criminality.

“Trump truly believes that the US is entitled to whatever resource it so desires ... it’s a real ‘might-makes-right’ logic that is both abhorrent and spectacularly miscalculated.” @pmbigger.bsky.social quoted in @theguardian.com 👇 www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Yeah Bosnia 🇧🇦👏

“This landmark on the water in Miami, Florida will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known…” Oceans Rise, Empires Fall… www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

The Art of the Steal, Geopolitics Edition. Truly remarkable playground discourse this.

Trump’s expanding territorial desires. www.nytimes.com/video/opinio...

Are #Trumpism and #MAGA beginning to #decline as recent MAGA influencer infighting about #Israel and the war in #iran suggest -- or is just more wishful thinking by the left? This @us.theconversation.com essay, based on my observations at this week's #CPAC 2026, suggests the answer may be yes.

The DC #nokings mall rally — organized by the “removal coalition” — was significantly smaller than the October rally. Some speeches were painful, some good. Joining the singular 🇺🇦 & 🇵🇸 flags were many 🇮🇷 flags. Energy elsewhere.

Butterflies against bullies! #nokings

Ducks against dictators. #nokings

Bold statement by Irish football players against the World Cup in Trump’s America. 🙄

While avoiding the word imperial, this op ed gets at an enduring aspect of US geopolitical culture that will eventually be exposed. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/o...

All academics have mentors to whom they owe gratitude for guidance and encouragement. For me John Agnew was one. I am very pleased to be part of the community celebrating the scholarship of John Agnew, with a chapter in this forthcoming Festschrift. www.routledge.com/How-John-Agn...

More than half of US Republicans think it likely US will « gain new territory » in next 10 years 😮

Our Political Geography seminar is reading this essay tonight. Books could be written on the Israel-Lebanon border & what it means to 'defend' it. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Remarkable restorative move that underscores the depth of the commitment to backlash political gestures. But in (re)marking space like this, it invites the future response, which will be to take it down and then some. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

”Trump Territory”

Adis Maksic has a new book forthcoming that addresses the actual foundations of political life in conflict-affected states and societies. It demolishes rationalist & strategic understandings of emotions in ethnicized political contexts. I recommend it highly.

I enjoyed listening to the audio version of this, read by the authors. The book is a valuable account of the material dilemmas presented by the prospect of a United Ireland. The book's strength is also its weakness: its a rationalist account that further deliberative democratic decision making.

Beautiful articulation of the extended sense of territoriality that Trump holds. No territorial trap thinking here: its ultra-imperialism, with reluctant participants and a leader becoming ambivalent.

I am late to this tragic and depressing news. In 1982 the editor kindly let me take home their actual paper archives for 1914-18 for my undergraduate thesis research (returned safely!) www.rte.ie/news/regiona...

Attending a conference at the National University of Ireland building on Merrion Square in Dublin was a long reunion of sorts for me. In the Spring of 1979 I sat my matriculation exams there, and started at NUI Maynooth that Autumn.

Great to catch up with folks in Ireland researching Ukraine today. Ukraine’s Ambassador to Ireland, Larysa Gerasko kicked things off by laying out the stakes. @GeraskoLarysa

“The pious fraud has been the treatment of choice for most European leaders.. : don’t confront the madness, go along with it and try to bend it back towards sanity” Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez is the one European leader who understands the folly of persisting with the pious fraud”

Price of our dependence on fossil fuels is becoming clear yet again www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026...

The new free substack by Marlene Laruelle is worth checking out. laruelle.substack.com?r=382u1&utm_...

There is a case for geopolitics hastening clean energy (not climate catastrophe). Price spikes & chaos from war in fossil-fuel producing regions helps make it.