Van Jackson is a professor of international relations at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and senior researcher at Security in Context, where he co-directs their project on Multipolarity, Great-Power Competition, and the Global South. He is also a think tanker at lots of places around the world: a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington; a distinguished fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada; a senior associate fellow at the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Nonproliferation & Disarmament (APLN); and the defence & strategy fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies in New Zealand. He writes The Un-Diplomatic newsletter and hosts The Un-Diplomatic Podcast. Before entering academia, Van was a foreign policy practitioner, working as a strategist and policy adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration and serving in the US Air Force as a Korean linguist and intelligence analyst. He is the author of five books, two on US-North Korea relations with Cambridge University Press, On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War (2018) and Rival Reputations: Coercion and Credibility in US-North Korea Relations (2016). His third book, with Yale University Press, is titled Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace (2023). His fourth book, with Cambridge University Press, is titled Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking (2023). And his fifth book, forthcoming with Yale University Press, is The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy.
