Mission 2026: Binge reviewing all previous Reads, I was too slothful to review back when I read them
Jackson’s ‘Introduction to International Relations: Theories and Approaches’ is one of those books that initially presents itself as a neutral academic map, only to reveal, on closer reading, how deeply political the act of mapping the world really is.
Revisiting it now, I was struck by its quiet discipline: Jackson resists both polemic and grand theory-worship, instead staging international relations as a field defined by competing lenses, each illuminating something while distorting something else.
Realism, liberalism, Marxism, constructivism, and normative theory are not offered as final answers but as habits of thought, ways of training the eye to notice power, institutions, ideas, and ethics differently.
What stayed with me most is Jackson’s insistence that theory is not an abstract indulgence but a practical necessity; how you explain the world determines what you think is possible within it.
Reading this after years of headlines filled with “inevitability” and “national interest,” the book feels bracingly honest about contingency. States are not natural facts; sovereignty is not timeless; order is not neutral. Jackson’s prose is restrained and pedagogical, but beneath that restraint lies a moral seriousness that refuses to let power masquerade as common sense.
The pluralism of the book is its strength and its discomfort: no framework is allowed total authority, and the reader is forced to live with unresolved tensions between security and justice, order and emancipation, stability and change.
What I appreciate most, looking back, is how the book subtly inoculated me against intellectual absolutism. It does not tell you what to think about the world, but it makes it harder to think lazily.
‘Introduction to International Relations’ taught me that global politics is not governed by a single logic but by overlapping, often contradictory narratives competing for legitimacy.
It leaves you with a sharpened skepticism toward claims of inevitability and a heightened awareness that theory itself is a form of power—one that shapes not only policy and scholarship, but the moral boundaries of what we are willing to imagine.
Recommended.