Gerard Toal’s original and illuminating new book, Oceans Rise, Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe, can help us better understand both the rupture that we are witnessing in the international order and the planetary consequences of this rupture. Toal’s insistence on recognizing “the geo-ecological character of geopolitics” (p. 12) feels particularly resonant in light of events in early 2026. The US invasion of Venezuela and subsequent energy agreement—estimated by The Guardian to consume more than a tenth of the remaining carbon budget compatible with the 1.5°C target by 2050—and President Trump’s interest in the strategic acquisition of Greenland exemplify the dynamics Toal identifies: a geopolitical logic that intensifies the drive for resource extraction and deepens planetary risk.
The book is underpinned by an observation made in the middle of this decade, a critical one for addressing climate change. Toal writes, “World powers today face a fundamentally new question: ‘Are rising Earth temperature and sea levels a greater emergency than the rising power of rival states?’” (p. 3). His answer is unequivocal: climate change is the pre-eminent existential challenge. Yet his analysis also demonstrates why great powers are structurally predisposed not to reach this conclusion. The initial framing suggests a dichotomy between geopolitics and climate change. One of the book’s principal strengths is its subsequent dismantling of this dichotomy, demonstrating instead the deep entanglement between geopolitical practices and Earth‑system transformation. This intervention extends existing scholarship on the nexus between security and climate change, including Bentley Allan’s work on the co-production of climate science and security institutions (Bentley Allan, “Producing the climate: States, scientists, and the constitution of global governance objects,” International Organization, 2017), as well as research on the global securitization of climate change.
Toal’s long-standing role in shaping the field of critical geopolitics provides a strong foundation for this intervention. His earlier work problematized the relationship between geographical knowledge and imperial power and critiqued the purported neutrality of traditional geopolitical thought. He has also played an important role in broadening the study of geopolitics, arguing that it is a cultural practice with practical and popular manifestations and not just an elite-driven geo-strategy. In this new book, Toal addresses what he identifies as two limitations of first-wave critical geopolitics: its failure to coherently establish itself as a distinct theoretical approach within IR, and its overemphasis on discourse at the expense of materiality. Drawing on scholars such as Simon Dalby and Bruno Latour, Toal calls for an “earthing” of geopolitics—an approach attentive to Earth‑system processes, planetary boundaries, and the material infrastructures through which geopolitical power is enacted. Significantly, he argues that geopolitical practices themselves—not merely geopolitical rivalries—are structural drivers of greenhouse gas emissions.
The theoretically rich introductory chapter surveys existing accounts of the collective failure to address climate change and lays out the core concepts used throughout the book. In his account of existing approaches, Toal touches on political economy, Marxist accounts, political ecology, philosophical explanations, and the psychological roots of the climate crisis. A minor sub-field quibble is that Toal does not grapple with the nuances of the arguments that have emerged in comparative politics to account for the international community’s failure on climate change. Over the last decade, the political science literature has moved away from characterizing climate change solely as a collective action problem. Scholars of comparative politics have argued that the climate crisis is also driven by distributive politics within nations. Dubash (2021, p. 1) suggests that since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, “climate politics has become at least as much about understanding dynamics within nations as it is understanding the interactions between nations” (Navroz Dubash, “Varieties of climate governance: the emergence and functioning of climate institutions,” Environmental Politics 30 (sup1), 2021).
In Chapter 1, Toal grapples with the concept of geopolitics, a concept that has been stretched to its limits. He offers a genealogy of the idea, tracing its meanings and uses across time and space as well as the (dis)connections between those meanings and uses. The conceptualization of geopolitics as a competitive game is the “most common understanding of the term today” (p. 39), and while many readers will be familiar with the German term geopolitik , Toal draws on deep and extensive readings of key thinkers to offer new insights about how the idea of geopolitics has travelled and evolved. He begins with some of the earliest thinkers on geopolitics: from Friedrich Ratzel, famous for the idea of lebensraum (living space), which was a core driver of Nazi ideology, and Halford Mackinder, a British geographer and Member of Parliament, who advocated for the modernization of the British Empire. He then turns to the Americanization of the concept, with the notable role played by Kissinger in putting forth both a philosophy and a (not entirely philosophically aligned) practice of geopolitics. Toal’s observations here are nuanced and illuminating: he notes that Kissinger’s realism “took for granted geo-ecological territories that supported US hegemony in the world, that powered the US military and fueled his shuttle diplomacy” (p. 38).
In Chapter 2, Toal turns to Mackinder’s work in the early part of the twentieth century. He traces how Mackinder’s focus on human–environment relations and technological innovation in thinking on geopolitics veered away from the structural approaches of the day. Toal takes up the mantle of this practice-based and materially oriented approach, while also highlighting the darker, uglier aspects of Mackinder’s writings, specifically the racist notions that underpin his ideas of empire. Throughout the chapter, the reader can sense the ambivalence Toal must have felt toward this key figure, but also the commitment to portray the whole of Mackinder. Parts of the chapter read as an attempt to elevate elements of Mackinder’s thinking that have been overlooked; other parts strive to reveal and critique his racism and its implications in terms of imperial rule.
In Chapter 3, the book turns to the idea of lebensraum (living space) to critically rethink the concept of geopolitics and tie it to the making of the modern world. Toal claims that “What makes Ratzel and Mackinder worth rereading in the era of climate change is how they connect international politics to broader earth processes” (p. 77). Toal revisits the classic idea of the security dilemma but adds the earthly twist, a “climate security dilemma” (p. 102). He notes that “In seeking to secure their own living spaces, the competitive territorial practices of great powers have undermined the broader living spaces that sustain human flourishing on Earth” (p. 86). The major theoretical contribution of the book is the way in which Toal takes up three of Mackinder’s ideas to fashion them into thinking tools for the critical analysis of geopolitics as territorial politics.
These three concepts—geopolitical fields, geopolitical cultures, and geospatial revolutions—are then the focus of Chapters 4–6, respectively. Chapter 4 focuses on territorial security dilemmas. One section that felt particularly timely is Toal’s exposition of the thinking of President James Monroe and its upgrading to the status of a doctrine (p. 108). Chapter 5 focuses on the missionary zeal of great powers and the ways in which the projection of these ideologies is reliant upon greenhouse gas emissions. Chapter 6 turns to the military-industrial complexes of great powers and the ratcheting up of technologies and associated hydrocarbons.
Chapter 7 turns toward the future, exploring how climate change is poised to reshape and destabilize geopolitical orders. Toal writes that climate change “is a material force that foists itself upon humans no matter what they think” (p. 185). He offers a sobering assessment of climate‑induced risks and critiques existing policy responses, including green‑growth strategies and the limitations of US efforts under the Biden administration. The result is a compelling, if disquieting, depiction of the structural challenges facing global climate governance.
The conclusion offers brief suggestions for mitigating the geopolitical drivers of climate change, highlighting the potential role of international institutions in reducing great power insecurity, constraining military-industrial complexes, and fostering shared missions. These proposals are underdeveloped and, to be fair, they are not the focus here. However, reading Oceans Rise, Empires Fall alongside my book, Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage, will be useful in developing an understanding of both the potential and limitations of international agreement-making and institution-building. International institutions may be a forum for defusing great power rivalry, but Governing the End suggests that these international institutions can also be sites where geopolitical (and other) tensions continue to play out, perhaps in more stealthy or harder-to-see ways or at different stages of the global policy-making process.
One limitation of Toal’s framework (or any framework focusing on geopolitics) is its heavy emphasis on the great powers. This focus risks overlooking the contributions, skirmishes, and role of smaller states and middle powers. Recent efforts—including the moral leadership of Small Island Developing States and proposals for middle‑power coalitions, such as those articulated by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at Davos in 2026—suggest that meaningful governance innovations may emerge from outside the great-power arena.
Overall, Oceans Rise, Empires Fall offers a sophisticated, theoretically rich, and empirically grounded reframing of geopolitics for the age of planetary crisis. It is a sobering but accessible and even enjoyable read. The book is “ground-breaking” in two ways: it incisively deconstructs territoriality as a geopolitical practice, and it is part of a new wave of critical geopolitics that is alive to the material entanglements within which the practice of geopolitics is situated. Toal provides an indispensable analysis of the structural impediments to effective climate action and a compelling call for rethinking international relations through a geo-ecological lens. The book will be of substantial interest to practitioners, students, and scholars alike across political science, political geography, and international relations.
