Patrick O'Sullivan

Patrick O'Sullivan is an Irish-British scholar and author of major works in the field of Military geography. He is the author of the oft-cited texts The Geography of Warfare and The Geography of War in the Post-Cold War World. Though the former was published in 1983 and the latter in 2001, these works remain the seminal texts of Military geography from a civilian publisher, due in large part to the present lack of interest in the subfield among geographers, aside from a small handful who critique militarization through critical theory. In his 1986 book Geopolitics, Patrick O'Sullivan makes a geographically-based case against the proliferation of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, arguing that nuclear weapons pose a threat largely because they reduce the significance of both physical distance and national borders, which would otherwise function as a deterrent to the likelihood of direct military engagement. Patrick O'Sullivan is also known to a lesser extent for his work on the social scientific study of railway transportation in Britain as well as an autoethnographic Cultural Geography essay discussing the relevance of expatriate identity.