Professor Peter Jackson

BA, MA, PhD, FRHistSoc, FRSE

Pronouns: he/him

Affiliations

Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada

Faculty of Arts, Department of History

Contact information

peter.jackson@ucalgary.ca

Location

Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies: SS832

Preferred method of communication

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Research partners

Background

Credentials

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Royal Historical Society, 2003

Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2016

Educational Background

PhD History, University of Cambridge, 1995

Biography

I hold the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Intelligence and Security in a Changing Global Order at the University of Calgary. He is based in the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies (CMSS) and is a member of the Department of History. He is a historian of international relations and intelligence whose work ranges across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interests in Franco-British relations, modern France, and the role of intelligence in policy-making.

Before coming to Calgary, I was Professor and Chair in Global Security at the University of Glasgow (2013–2026), and earlier taught at Aberystwyth University and the University of Strathclyde. He was the founding Executive Director of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs and edited the journal Intelligence and National Security from 2004 to 2016. From 2014 to 2019 I was Distinguished Research Professor at the Norwegian Defence Intelligence University. I have also been visiting professor at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the University of Padua. I received my PhD from the University of Cambridge and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Royal Historical Society and sit on the Editorial and Advisory Boards of .

Research

Areas of Research

Security and Foreign Policy

My research brings together three fields that are usually studied separately: the cultural history of international relations, the history of global order, Franco-British relations, and intelligence studies. What links them is a long-standing interest in how policy elites perceive the world around them. I am interested in how political culture, memories of the past and professional practice shape the way information is interpreted and turned into policy.

Much of my work applies the insights of cultural history and social theory to foreign and security policy. Beyond the Balance of Power (2014) reinterpreted French national security policy in the era of the First World War. It traced how competing conceptions of security, rooted in different political cultures, shaped policy-making from the pre-war years through the Paris Peace Conference. I have also written on what Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology offers international historians, and on peacemaking and international order after 1918.

Franco-British relations run through much of this work. I led the AHRC-funded project “The Weight of the Past in Franco-British Relations since 1815.” It examines how representations of the past shaped the way British and French policy-makers understood each other, and how this affected cooperation between the two states. My work in intelligence studies began with France and the Nazi Menace (Oxford, 2000), a study of intelligence and policy-making in the years before the Second World War. More recently I co-wrote a global history of modern intelligence with Sébastien Laurent, published in French in 2025 as L’essor du renseignement moderne. Une histoire globale de l’espionnage and will appear in English as The Rise of Modern Intelligence. I am also co-editing the first volume ofThe Cambridge History of Intelligence with Sir David Omand and the The Oxford Handbook of French History since 1789 with Sarah Dunstan (University of Glasgow) and Andrew Smith (Queen Mary University, London).

Participation in university strategic initiatives

Human Dynamics in a Changing World (2015-2021)

Democracy, Justice, and Sustainability

Projects

Intelligence and Security in a Changing Global Order

This research program is funded through the Federal Government's Impact+ Initiative (2026–2032). Based in the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies (CMSS), it examines how intelligence and security are being transformed by technological change and a shifting international order. It works closely with policy stakeholders in Canada and among its allies.

The program has four workstreams:

Intelligence and the Future of the North Atlantic Alliance (2026–2031). Examines how Canada and its European allies can build new relationships in a transformed North Atlantic security environment, with intelligence cooperation at the centre. It asks how membership of the Five Eyes affects Canada’s ability to forge new partnerships in Europe, which relationships should be prioritized, and whether Canada needs a dedicated foreign intelligence agency.
Public Attitudes toward Security and Intelligence in Canada (2027–2030). Annual Canada-wide surveys of public confidence in Canada’s intelligence agencies, attitudes to the balance between security and civil liberties, and public understanding of the relationship between secret intelligence and democratic governance.
The Open-Source Arctic Security Observation Unit (2028–2032). An independent, open-access repository of open-source data on geostrategic developments in the Arctic. It combines machine learning and natural language processing with expert human analysis, and is jointly led with Dr. Rob Huebert of CMSS.
Technology and the Evolution of Intelligence Practices in the Twentieth Century (2032–2034). Places today’s technological transformation of intelligence, from machine learning and large language models to quantum cryptography, in historical perspective. It does this by examining technology-driven revolutions in intelligence practice during the two World Wars and the Cold War.

The program opens with an initial workshop on “The Changing Character of Intelligence Assessment.” It will bring together policy stakeholders, historians, scholars of strategic and security studies, and experts in new technologies such as large language models and quantum sensing. The workshop will examine how intelligence assessment is being transformed by new technologies and a changing strategic environment, and what lessons past practice holds for the future.

Publications

Journal articles

‘Woodrow Wilson, Power and World Order at the Paris Peace Conference’. Peter Jackson. Federal History, 18, 1. 45-74. (2026)
‘The Locarno Accords and the Evolution of French Foreign Policy between the Two World Wars’.. Peter Jackson. Diplomacy & Statecraft, 37, 3. 834-60. (2026)