I did not teach any courses in Political Geography when I first started lecturing - I was initially employed in Maynooth to teach Urban Geography and Quantitative Methods. However, an opportunity arose when it was decided that we should include some regional courses in our curriculum. I offered a course in Eastern Europe. This was by no means confined to political issues, but it would have been fairly pointless to give a course on Eastern Europe without a detailed consideration of ethnic problems and also the ideological tensions between the Soviet Union and its satellites. The Eastern Europe course consequently provided Maynooth students with a first exposure to many aspects of Political Geography.
There are many similarities, although also some important differences, between Eastern Europe and the conflict in Ireland. Some of these comparisons were explored in an introductory Political Geography course to first year students. However, at some point in the late 1970s, I began to explore the national conflict in Ireland in more depth in a course called the Political Geography of Ireland . This traced the growth of republicanism and nationalism in Ireland, and the links to similar developments in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the subsequent growth of unionism in Ulster. One of my students at this time, Gerard Toal (aka Gearoid O Tuathail), went on to become an international authority on Critical Geopolitics. However, this was probably despite any influence I may have had, rather than because of it, although I like to think that my lectures on national identities as contested and evolutionary may have had some formative influence.
I adopted Peter Taylor's book Political Geography: World Economy, Nation-State and Locality as the main text for a more general Political Geography course following the publication of the 1st edition in mid-1980s. However, the course evolved quite rapidly and by the late-1980s it had split into two courses, neither of which adhered too closely to Taylor's text (although it continued to provide a loose framework). One course became the Geography of Political Conflict, whilst the other became the Geography of Political Power. The Geography of Political Conflict was taught to first years and provided an introduction to classical geopolitics and then reviewed various factors which have resulted in armed conflicts. The course included a number of case studies, including Yugoslavia, Israel/Palestine, the Iran-Iraq war, and Sino-Indian border disputes. The Geography of Political Power was normally taught to second year students, although it was occasionally offered to third years. The course included quite a lot of electoral geography, brilliantly organised around a flow diagram which provided a synthesising framework. Unfortunately, I think I was the only person who actually understood the diagram.
I have also taught political geography as a component in other courses, most notably the regional course on Africa in the early 1990s. The Africa course tended to be orientated towards development issues, but it is impossible to make any sense out of Africa's problems without an understanding of its colonial legacy and its many wars and political conflicts. Most texts discuss imperialism, but curiously overlook (or understate) the contemporary political problems.
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