John M. Owen, IV

John Owen, A.B. (Duke), M.P.A. (Princeton), A.M., Ph.D. (Harvard), Taylor Professor of Politics, is a political scientist who specializes in international relations.  He is a member of the faculty in the Department of Politics at UVa and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (IASC) and the Miller Center of Public Affairs. From August 2017 through August 2020 he was Chair of UVa's Department of Politics. During the Spring '24 semester he is an Academic Visitor at Nuffield College, University of Oxford (Hilary & Trinity terms). 

Owen's research concerns how ideological and cultural similarities and differences affect, and are affected by, international relations.  He is interested in the relationship between domestic and international orders; how the regimes and ideas of hegemonic powers tend to diffuse across countries and affect the balance of international power; 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?).

  Owen's newest book, titled The Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order (Yale University Press, 2023), argues that democracy in America and elsewhere depends in part upon an international environment that, in evolutionary fashion, selects for it.  Great powers typically shape their international environments to select for their own regime type -- or, more precisely, to minimize tradeoffs between their domestic regime type and their international competitiveness.  Liberal internationalism as practiced by the United States and other mature democracies did select for democracy within those countries for many decades, but in its early 21st-century form is no longer doing so; it is too disruptive and alienating to too many citizens.  Furthermore, China and Russia are shaping the international environment so as to reduce its liberal bias and to safeguard their authoritarian-capitalist regimes.  Thus the claim of leaders in the United States is true: the Sino-American rivalry is at once a global contest between democracy and authoritarianism. But the U.S. and other democratic governments must reform liberalism, as they have in the past, to fit it for the rest of the twenty-first century.  Podcasts and public events organized around the book may be found here, here, here, and here. 

With Richard Rosecrance, Owen is co-author of International Politics: How History Modifies Theory (Oxford University Press, 2018).  An international relations textbook, International Politics presents the development of international relations and its theories in a historical narrative spanning 500 years.  The book offers a fresh perspective on twenty-first-century world politics, arguing that whether liberalism or realism better explains world politics depends on time and place. 

Owen is author of Confronting Political Islam: Six Lessons from the West's Past (Princeton University Press, 2015).  From transnational ideological struggles in the history of the West, the book draws lessons on the dynamics of conflict in the Muslim world today and what the outside world ought, and ought not, to do in response.  A March 2015 article in Foreign Affairs presents many of the main points.  Anthony Gill (University of Washington) interviews Owen about the book in this podcast.  Reviews of the book are here, here, and here.  Editions in Korean and Portuguese are available.  Confronting Political Islam was shortlisted for the 2017 Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize. 

Confronting Political Islam builds upon Owen's previous 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.  The book won the 2011 Joseph Lepgold Prize for Best Book on International Relations, awarded by the Mortara Center at Georgetown University.  A Chinese language version is forthcoming from World Affairs Press in Beijing.  An interview on WMRA public radio 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.

Owen's 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 on the Western canon and IR theory; the sources and prospects of American hegemony; the rationalist-constructivist divide in IR research; forcible domestic regime (e.g., democracy) promotion; and the second U.S.-Iraq war.  

He has published peer-reviewed work in the Cato Journal, European Journal of International Relations, European Journal of International Security, Global Policy, International Affairs, International Organization, International Politics, Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, International Relations, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, Political Analysis, and Perspectives on Politics. He also has published articles in Foreign Affairs, The Hedgehog Review, New York Times, Washington Post (here and here), National Interest, The Hill, USA Today, The Messenger, and a number of edited volumes, most recently Soft Power and the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. Hendrik Ohnesorge (Manchester University Pres, 2023). 

 For academic year 2020-21, Owen was a Visiting Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of British Columbia.  A recipient of a Humboldt Research Award, Owen has been a visiting fellow at the Otto Suhr Institute at the Free University of Berlin and the Global Governance Group at the WZB Berlin Social Science Research Center.  Owen also been a visiting scholar at Nuffield College, Oxford; the Rothermere American Institute in Oxford; the Center of International Studies at Princeton; the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford; and the Olin Institute of Strategic Studies at Harvard.  Owen was Editor of Security Studies from 2011 to 2014, and serves on the editorial board of that journal and of International Security.  

His vitæ may be found here.

Owen discusses his work here and here.  Discussions with other scholars and policy makers are here and here.

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.

This is John Owen's personal web page.