Grand Strategies of the Left - In Conversation with Van Jackson

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Van Jackson – author of the new book Grand Strategies of the Left. The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking – explains what distinguishes progressives from liberal internationalists; clarifies why he thinks that the tradition of grand strategy might be worth rescuing by and for progressives; discusses the three main progressive grand strategies that are recurrently articulated in the US these days, what they priorities are, and what risks they respectively contain; distils the main consensual points of progressive worldmaking; and reflects on what a global starting point for agendas comparable to his own might lead to.

Van Jackson is a political scientist and a scholar of international relations who specializes 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. He also acts as a Senior Research Scholar at Security in Context where he co-directs the “Multipolarity, Great-power Competition, and the Global South” project. He is the author of four books, has made contributions to a wide range of international media, and runs The Undiplomatic Podcast.

Grand Strategies of the Left. The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking has been published by Cambridge University Press.

In collaboration with Lucie Hunter.