John Owen, A.B. (Duke), M.P.A. (Princeton), A.M., Ph.D. (Harvard), is Taylor Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. He is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (IASC) and at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. From 2017 through 2020 he was Chair of UVa's Department of Politics.
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) – winner of the 2025 Grawemeyer Award in World Order – argues that democracy in America and elsewhere depend 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.
Owen’s other books include:
- International Politics: How History Modifies Theory (Oxford University Press, 2018), a textbook co-authored with Richard Rosecrance.
- Confronting Political Islam: Six Lessons from the West's Past (Princeton University Press, 2015), shortlisted for the 2017 Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize.
- The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change 1510-2010 (Princeton University Press, 2010), which 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.
- Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order (Columbia University Press, 2011), co-edited with J. Judd Owen, considers whether the solutions to religious conflict proposed by the Western Enlightenment are feasible within, or appropriate to, non-Western religions.
- Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Cornell University Press, 1997). Along with several of his articles and book chapters, this book advances an explanation for why liberal democracies seldom fight wars against one another.
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).
Owen has been an academic visitor or visiting fellow at Nuffield College (2007, 2024) and the Rothermere American Institute (2001, 2007), University of Oxford; the University of British Columbia (2020-21); the Otto Suhr Institute at the Free University of Berlin and the Global Governance Group at the WZB Berlin Social Science Research Center (2015-16); the Center of International Studies at Princeton (2000); the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford (1994-95); the Olin Institute of Strategic Studies at Harvard (1992-94); and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard (1992-93). In 2015 he received a Humboldt Research Award (Bonn, Germany). Owen was Editor of Security Studies from 2011 to 2014, and serves on the editorial board of that journal as well as that of International Security.
