Patricia Owens is Professor of International Relations and author or editor of six books. She went to a state school in London and, as the first in her family to go to university, did not even think to apply to Oxbridge. For undergraduate admissions, she particularly welcomes applications from students at non-selective state schools.
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 was Principal Investigator of the multi-award winning Leverhulme Research Project on Women and the History of International Thought.
Her new book Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men is published by Princeton University Press (2025).
Economy of Force (Cambridge, 2015) won BISA's Susan Strange Prize for the Best Book in International Studies and the ISA Theory Section Best Book Award. Her co-edited volume Women's International Thought: Toward a New Canon (Cambridge 2022) also won BISA's Susan Strange Prize for the Best Book in International Studies as well as the ISA Theory Section Prize for Best Edited Volume. Another co-edited volume,Women's International Thought: A New History (Cambridge 2021) won the ISA History Section Prize for Best Edited Volume and the ISA's Theory Section Prize for Best Edited Volume. An article with Kim Hutchings won APSA's Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory for Best Article in English Language. Her first book was on war in the thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford, 2007).
Patricia 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.
She is co-editor of the leading undergraduate textbook, The Globalization of World Politics (Oxford, 2023), OUP's highest selling social science textbook, now in its 9th edition and translated into nine languages. She is a past co-editor of European Journal of International Relations and now sits on the editorial boards of Security Dialogue and Political Studies. She was previously on the boards of the Journal of International Political Theory and Humanity and was managing editor of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs during her MPhil at Cambridge.
Professional Responsibilities
Patricia is a Tutorial Fellow of Somerville College, sitting on its Governing Body. She is Director of Research Methods for International Relations.
During 2018, Patricia was consultant on a project on Hannah Arendt at the Joint Research Centre at the European Commission. In Spring 2022, she co-curated a Public Exhibition on women's international thought in London.
Research
Patricia was the Director of the Leverhulme Research Project Grant, Women and the History of International Thought. This multidisciplinary and multi-methodological project systematically recovered and evaluated the international thought of women both inside and outside academe during the early to long mid-twentieth-century, focusing on Britain and the United States. Already published work and forthcoming work includes edited volumes, multiple journal articles, a monograph, doctoral dissertation, new Oral History archive and web resource, multiple journal special sections and roundtables on the Project, and a Public Exhibition in London. Patricia's co-investigators were Katharina Rietzler and Kimberly Hutchings.
She was also Co-Investigator on a Danish Council for Independent Research (2019-2024) project on images. Bodies as Battleground: Gender Images and International Security is led by Professor Lene Hansen (Copenhagen).
Teaching
Patricia teaches Somerville PPE undergraduates the core IR paper and the two historical papers, IR in the Era of World Wars and IR during the Cold War. She teaches IR MPhil students part of the core paper, and the optional course, Historical and Interpretive Methods.
She received a Teaching Excellence Award from the Social Science Teaching Audit at Oxford and was nominated for university-wide teaching awards at QMUL and Sussex.
Patricia welcomes applications from prospective DPhil students working across a range of IR themes and approaches to twentieth-century international history and theory, disciplinary history and the history of international and political thought. She is particularly keen to supervise projects that overlap with her current research projects.
Publications
Monographs
Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton University Press, 2025)
Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
- Winner, BISA’s Susan Strange Best Book in International Studies; Winner, International Studies Association Theory Section Best Book Award; Special section, Security Dialogue
Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford University Press, 2007)
Edited Volumes
Women’s International Thought: Towards A New Canon co-editor with S. Dunstan, K. Hutchings, K. Rietzler (Cambridge, 2022)
- Winner, BISA’s Susan Strange Best Book in International Studies; Winner of the ISA Theory Section Prize for Best Edited Volume
- Subject of fora in International Theory, International Politics Review, Journal of Contemporary Political Theory, H-Diplo, The Journal of the History of Ideas blog, and review essay in International Relations
Women’s International Thought: A New History co-editor with Katharina Rietzler (Cambridge, 2021)
- Winner of the ISA History Section Prize for Best Edited Volume; Winner of the Theory Section Prize for Best Edited Volume
- Subject of fora in International Theory, International Politics Review, Journal of Contemporary Political Theory, and H-Diplo, and a review essay in International Relations
The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations 9th edition (Oxford, 2023) co-editor with J. Baylis and S. Smith and previous editions in 2008, 2011, 2014, 2017, and 2020
- Translated into Arabic, French, Korean, Polish, Greek, Turkish, Slovene, Macedonian, Kazakh, and Hungarian
Articles (select)
Images of International Thinkers, Review of International Studies, 20(6) 2024: 1088-1107
Polyphonic Internationalism: The Lucie Zimmern School of International studies, The International Historical Review, 45(4) 2023: 623-642 (with K. Rietzler)
Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought: Recovery, Rejection , and Reconstitution, American Political Science Review, 115(2) 2021: 347-359 (with K. Hutchings)
- Winner, American Political Science Association Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory for Best Article in English Language in 2021
- OOIR’s ‘top trending’ of all political science articles in the week following publication
Claudia Jones, International Thinker, Modern Intellectual History, 19(2) 2021: 551-574 (with S. Dunstan)
Women and the History of International Thought, International Studies Quarterly, 62(3) 2018: 467-481
Decolonizing Civil War, CAL: International & Interdisciplinary Law Review, 4(2) 2017: 160-169
Racism in the Theory Canon: Hannah Arendt and ‘the one Great Crime in which America was Never Involved’, Millennium, 45(33) 2017: 403-424
The International Origins of Hannah Arendt’s Historical Method, Political Power and Social Theory (32) 2017: 37-62
Method or Madness: Sociolatry in International Thought, Review of International Studies, 41(4) 2015: 655-674
From Bismarck to Petraeus: The Question of the Social and the Social Question in Counterinsurgency, European Journal of International Relations, 19(1) 2013: 135-157
Human Security and the Rise of the Social, Review of International Studies, 38(3) 2012: 547-567. Highly commended by the Article Prize Committee. Subject of a panel at 2018 ISA
Not Life but the World is at Stake: Hannah Arendt on Citizenship in the Age of the Social, Citizenship Studies, 16(2) 2012: 295-305
The Supreme Social Concept: The Un-worldliness of Modern Security, New Formations, 71: 2011: 14-29
Torture, Sex and Military Orientalism, Third World Quarterly, 31(7) 2010: 1147-1162
Reclaiming “Bare Life”? Against Agamben on Refugees, International Relations, 23(4) 2009: 567-82; reprinted in Betts and Loescher (eds.) Refugees in International Relations (Oxford)
Distinctions, Distinctions: “Public” and “Private” Force? International Affairs, 84(5) 2008: 977-90; reprinted in Colás and Mabee (eds.) Mercenaries, Pirates, Bandits and Empires (Columbia)
Beyond Strauss, Lies, and the War in Iraq: Hannah Arendt’s Critique of Neoconservatism, Review of International Studies, 33(2) 2007: 265-83; among top ten most cited articles during 2013-15
Accidents Don’t Just Happen: The Liberal Politics of High-Tech Humanitarian War, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 32(3) 2003: 595-616
Book chapters (select)
Introduction: Toward a History of Women’s International Thought with Rietzler in Owens and Rietzler (eds.) Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge, 2020)
Introduction: From International Politics to World Politics, with Baylis and Smith in Baylis, Smith and Owens (eds.) The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations (Oxford, 8ed.)
How Dangerous it can be to be Innocent in M. Goldoni and C. McCorkindale (eds.) Hannah Arendt and the Law (Hart, 2012): 251-270
The Return of Realism? War and Changing Concepts of the Political in S. Scheipers and H. Strachan (eds.) The Changing Character of War (Oxford, 2011): 484-502
The Ethics of War: Critical Alternatives in D. Bell (ed.) Ethics and World Politics (Oxford, 2010): 309-323
Walking Corpses: Arendt on the Limits and the Possibilities of Cosmopolitan Politics, in C. Moore and C. Farrands (eds.) International Relations Theory and Philosophy: Interpretive Dialogues (Routledge, 2010): 72-82
Hannah Arendt, in J. Edkins and N. Vaughan-Williams (eds.) Critical Theorists and International Relations (Routledge, 2009): 31-41
The Ethic of Reality in Hannah Arendt, in D. Bell (ed.) Political Thought and International Relations (Oxford, 2008), pp.105-121
Hannah Arendt, Violence, and the Inescapable Fact of Humanity in A.F. Lang and J. Williams (eds.) Hannah Arendt and International Relations (Palgrave, 2005): 41-65
