“What Good is the National Interest? Rethinking the Roots of Peace, Democracy, and War”
Van Jackson (Victoria University of Wellington)
This event is presented in collaboration with the Institute for International and Regional Studies National Resource Center (IRIS NRC).
The concept of the “national interest” has become an underappreciated source of global insecurity. Not because there is anything intrinsically wrong with people having interests that must be preserved, promoted, or protected. Rather, the “national interest” as such obscures whose interests are served (and harmed) by the efforts of policy elites to secure the state. Governments routinely use the language of the national interest to justify a politics of violence, secrecy, and exclusion while bracketing off explicit questions of morality and justice. And national frameworks for mobilizing resources and collective action are logically mismatched against global threats like climate change. But rather than wishing away the modern nation-state or simply suggesting changes to the words that governing elites use, this lecture will argue that addressing the contradictions in the national interest—as well as some of international security studies’ most cherished strategic constructs—is a start point for constructing more durable forms of security.
Dr. Van Jackson is a scholar of international relations specializing in East Asian and Pacific security, critical analysis of defense issues, and the intersection of working-class interests with foreign policy. He is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, a Senior Research Scholar at Security in Context–where he co-directs the “Multipolarity, Great-Power Competition, and the Global South” project–and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington. Van is the author of five books, including Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (Yale University Press, 2025). He has appeared widely in the media, including on The Majority Report with Sam Seder, HBO’s Vice News Tonight, CNN, BBC Radio, and Planet America. His writing has been featured in Foreign Affairs, Dissent, The Nation, Jacobin, New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among others. Van also writes The Un-Diplomatic Newsletter and co-hosts Bang-Bang–a podcast about war movies from an anti-imperialist perspective.
Register here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/havenswrightcenter/1534035
Please direct any event questions to the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice at pagac@wisc.edu
