Live Lecture: What Good is the National Interest?

A lecture at the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice, University of Wisconsin

Last year I was chosen to be a 2024-2025 visiting scholar with the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. It was an honor in part because the “Wright” part of that name is Erik Olin-Wright, a scholar whose work (on class analysis) really helped me make sense of the world during the Trump years.

As part of this association with the Havens Wright Center, I gave a public lecture entitled “What Good is The National Interest? Rethinking the Roots of Peace, Democracy, and War.”

About the lecture:

The concept of the “national interest,” Van Jackson argues, has become an under-appreciated 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 argues 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.

The full lecture plus Q&A:

For paid subscribers, a transcript of the lecture can be found below: