Patricia Owens

Patricia Owens is Professor of International Relations. Her research interests include twentieth-century international history and theory, historical and contemporary practices of Anglo-American counterinsurgency and military intervention, and disciplinary history and the history of international and political thought. She is Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme Research Project on Women and the History of International Thought.

Her most recent book, Economy of Force (Cambridge, 2015) won BISA's Susan Strange Prize for the Best Book in International Studies, the ISA Theory Section Best Book Award, and was Runner up for the Guicciardini Prize for Best Book in Historical IR. Patricia's first book, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt, was published by Oxford in 2007/09.

Patricia's current book project is a revisionist history of the practices, genres and audiences of international relations expertise in early to long mid-twentieth century Britain. The book takes up a set of figures largely unknown to IR to shed new light on the field’s racial and gendered history and the attendant consequences on its range and intellectual quality. It is thematically organized around professional contexts, kinship and intimate relations, fields and disciplines, and race/nation.

She is a former Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard; Jane Eliza Proctor Research Fellow at Princeton; Visiting Kathleen Fitzpatrick Professor in History at Sydney; Seton-Watson Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford; Visiting Professor at UCLA; Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley; and Postdoctoral Fellow at USC.

Patricia is co-editor of the leading undergraduate textbook in IR, The Globalization of World Politics (Oxford, 2020), OUP's highest selling social science textbook, now in its 7th edition and translated into nine languages. With former colleagaues at Sussex, she was co-editor of European Journal of International Relations and now sits on the editorial boards of EJIR, Security Dialogue and Political Studies. She was previously on the boards of Journal of International Political Theory and Humanity and was managing editor of Cambridge Review of International Affairs during her M.Phil. at Cambridge.