Peter Jackson

My research brings together areas of research that are usually studied separately: intelligence studies, the cultural history of international relations, the history of global order, Franco-British relations, and modern and contemporary France. What links these fields of research for me is a long-standing interest in how policy elites perceive the world around them. I am interested in how political culture, representations of the past and professional practices shape the way information about the outside world 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 (Cambridge, 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 written on the utility of Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural theory for historians of international relations, and I am also interested in the past, present and future of international order.

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, ublished in French in 2025 as L’essor du renseignement moderne. Une histoire globale de l’espionnage; it will appear in English with Hurst Publishers as The Rise of Modern Intelligence. 

I have also worked on the role of power and international law in approaches to peacemaking and international ordering after the First World War. These questions are explored in Peacemaking and International Order after the First World War, co-edited with William Mulligan and Glenda Sluga (Cambridge, 2023) as well as my contribution to the The Cambridge Handbook on the League of Nations and International Law (Cambridge, 2026) and a chapter with William Mulligan in the edited volume Beyond the Great War: making peace in a disordered world (Toronto, 2022).

Franco-British relations has been the focus of much of my most recent 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 themselves and each other, and how this affected cooperation between the two states. 

I am also co-editing the first volume of The Cambridge History of Intelligence with Sir David Omand and The Oxford Handbook of French History since 1789 with Sarah Dunstan (University of Glasgow) and Andrew Smith (Queen Mary University of London).