| Professor of Politics, University of Virginia |
Owen's research concerns how ideological and cultural similarities and differences affect, and are affected by, international relations. He is particularly interested in how transnational networks perpetuate and challenge ideologies and regime types; resistance and alternatives to predominant regime types (e.g., Islamism; authoritarian capitalism) and how these can cause civil unrest, foreign intervention, and war; the recursive relationship between hegemony and ideological attractiveness; how political identities de-activate and re-activate; and the life cycles of regime types across regions (e.g., how did liberal democracy come to be dominant in so many places? how long will this dominance last? how might it end?). Recently he has published two books. The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change 1510-2010 (Princeton University Press, 2010), advances an explanation for forcible foreign regime promotion, a practice that has waxed and waned across the past five centuries. Clash of Ideas is the winner of the Joseph Lepgold Prize for Best Book on International Relations for 2010, awarded by the Mortara Center at Georgetown University. A public radio interview about Clash of Ideas is available here. Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order (Columbia University Press, 2011), co-edited with J. Judd Owen of Emory University and produced under the auspices of the IASC, considers whether the solutions to religious conflict proposed by the Western Enlightenment are feasible within, or appropriate to, non-Western religions.
His first book, Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Cornell University Press, 1997), and several of his articles and book chapters, advance an explanation for why liberal democracies seldom fight wars against one another. Owen also has published work on the Western canon and IR theory; the sources of American hegemony; the rationalist-constructivist divide in IR research; forcible domestic regime (e.g., democracy) promotion; and the ongoing Iraq war. His work has appeared in International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, International Politics, Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, International Relations, Perspectives on Politics, as well as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, National Interest, and a number of edited volumes, most recently History and Neorealism, ed. Ernest May, Richard Rosecrance, and Zara Steiner (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Owen is currently writing a book intended for a more general audience, provisionally titled What Western History Can Teach Us about Political Islam. From transnational ideological movements in the history of the West, this new book draws lessons concerning the dynamics of ideological conflict in the Muslim world today and what the outside world ought, and ought not, to do. Owen also has plans for two new projects. One concerns why during some periods authoritarian states have fared better than democracies, while in other periods democracies have seemed to enjoy an advantage; the answers could help us better project the future of liberal democracy, and American soft power, in world politics. Another project is on the history and importance of so-called Fifth Columns in the origins and durations of wars.
An Excel spreadsheet of his data on forcible regime promotion 1510-2010 may be found here.
To contact John Owen, please e-mail him at jmo4n[at]virginia[dot]edu.