People

Patricia Owens

PhD

Professor of International Relations, DPIR
Tutorial Fellow, Somerville College
AFFILIATION
CIS
Political Thought Network
Political Theory Network
International Relations Network
College
Somerville College

Patricia Owens is Professor of International Relations. 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 and a Co-Investigator on a Danish Council for Independent Research Project.

Her forthcoming book Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men will be published by Princeton University Press in late 2024.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, women played a prominent role in the creation of a new cross-disciplinary intellectual field in imperial Britain: ‘international relations’. Born of crises of Empire, this new field of knowledge relied on women’s intellectual labours and expertise on empire and colonial administration, anticolonial organising, non-Western powers, and international organisations. Figures such as Margery Perham, Eileen Power, Merze Tate, Claudia Jones, Coral Bell, and Susan Strange were among the leading international thinkers of their generation. Many others shaped the development of the new field as scholars, journalists, public intellectuals and information managers, as heterosexual spouses and in intimate partnerships between women. Patricia Owens interweaves interpersonal, institutional, and intellectual stories of a cohort of women to recast the history of international relations in a new kind of critical disciplinary history. Using archival sources, Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men returns to key moments and locations in the effort to form international relations as a separate academic discipline in Britain. Challenging existing histories in which women and people of colour are missing, Erased includes the thinkers, fields, and approaches against which a small group of men tried to redefine international relations, revealing the intellectual and institutional practices of misogyny and racism in its earliest institutions. With a story of power, knowledge, and erasure, Owens offers a new diagnosis of international relations’ failure as an intellectual project and sources for its renewal.

Patricia's most recent monograph, 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. Her 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. And the co-edited volume Women's International Thought: Toward a New Canon (Cambridge 2022) won the ISA 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).

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, 2023), OUP's highest selling social science textbook, now in its 9th edition and translated into nine languages. With former colleagues at Sussex, she was co-editor of the 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 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, Standing Committee. 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).  

Patricia's research interests include Political Theory, Gender, Political thought and ideologies, Feminism, Gender, History, International relations, Power.

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 MPhils students part of the core paper, The Development of the International System, 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.

Patricia Owens

Publications

Journal Articles

2024

Owens, P. (2024) “Images of international thinkers”, Review of International Studies [Preprint].

2023

Hutchings, K. et al. (no date) “Recovering Women’s International Thought: Past and Present Futures”, Global Intellectual History, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–6.
Owens, P. and Rietzler, K. (2023) “Polyphonic internationalism: The Lucie Zimmern School of International studies”, The International History Review [Preprint].
Owens, P. and Rietzler, K. (2023) “Polyphonic internationalism: the Lucie Zimmern School of International Studies”, The International History Review [Preprint].
Hutchings, K. and Owens, P. (2023) “Introduction to the Special Issue: Women and the History of International Thought”, Global Studies Quarterly, 3(1).
Rietzler, K. and Owens, P. (2023) “The Joseph Fletcher prize forum: response to reviewers”, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 36(1), pp. 105–108.

2022

Owens, P. et al. (2022) “Theorizing the history of women’s international thinking at the ’end of international theory’”, International Theory, 14(3), pp. 388–393.
Hutchings, K. et al. (2022) “On canons and question marks: The work of women’s international thought”, Contemporary Political Theory, 21(1), pp. 114–141.

2021

Owens, P. et al. (2021) “Cause and evidence: on the erasure of women’s international thought and IR’s ‘failure as an intellectual project’”, International Politics Reviews, 9(2), pp. 241–245.
Owens, P. (2021) “History, race and the pitfalls of ideal normative theorizing”, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 34(6), pp. 846–850.
Dunstan, S. and Owens, P. (2021) “Claudia Jones, international thinker”, Modern Intellectual History, 19(2), pp. 551–574.
Hutchings, K. and Owens, P. (2021) “Women thinkers and the canon of international thought: recovery, rejection, and reconstitution”, American Political Science Review, 115(2), pp. 347–359.

2018

Owens, P. (2018) “Women and the History of International Thought”, International Studies Quarterly, 62(3), pp. 467–481.

2017

Owens, P. (2017) “The international origins of Hannah Arendt’s historical method”, International Origins of Social and Political Theory, 32, pp. 37–62.
Owens, P. (2017) “Racism in the Theory Canon: Hannah Arendt and ‘the One Great Crime in Which America Was Never Involved’”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 45(3), pp. 403–424.

2016

Owens, P. (2016) “International historical what?”, International Theory, 8(3), pp. 448–457.
Owens, P. (2016) “On the conduct of sociological warfare: A reply to the special section on Economy of Force”, Security Dialogue, 47(3), pp. 215–222.

2015

OWENS, P. (2015) “Introduction: Historicising the Social in International Thought”, Review of International Studies, 41(4), pp. 651–653.
Owens, P. (2015) “Method or madness? Sociolatry in international thought”, Review of International Studies, 41(4), pp. 655–674.

2013

Owens, P. (2013) “From Bismarck to Petraeus: The question of the social and the Social Question in counterinsurgency”, European Journal of International Relations, 19(1), pp. 139–161.
Jahn, B., Newell, P. and Owens, P. (2013) “Editorial”, European Journal of International Relations, 19(1), pp. 3–3.

2012

OWENS, P. (2012) “Human security and the rise of the social”, Review of International Studies, 38(3), pp. 547–567.
Owens, P. (2012) “Not life but the world is at stake: Hannah Arendt on citizenship in the age of the social”, Citizenship Studies, 16(2), pp. 297–307.

2010

Owens, P. (2010) “Torture, sex and military Orientalism”., Third world quarterly, 31(7), pp. 1041–1056.

2008

OWENS, P. (2008) “Distinctions, distinctions: ‘public’ and ‘private’ force?”, International Affairs, 84(5), pp. 977–990.
Owens, P. (2008) “Humanity, Sovereignty and the Camps”, International Politics, 45(4), pp. 522–530.

2007

OWENS, P. (2007) “Beyond Strauss, lies, and the war in Iraq: Hannah Arendt’s critique of neoconservatism”, Review of International Studies, 33(2), pp. 265–283.

2004

Owens, P. (2004) “Xenophilia, Gender, and Sentimental Humanitarianism”, Alternatives Global Local Political, 29(3), pp. 285–304.

2003

Owens, P. (2003) “Accidents Don’t Just Happen: The Liberal Politics of High-Technology `Humanitarian’ War”, Millennium Journal of International Studies, 32(3), pp. 595–616.

Books

2021

Owens, P. et al. (2021) Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon. Cambridge University Press.
Owens, P. and Rietzler, K. (2021) Women’s International Thought: A New History. Cambridge University Press.

2017

Baylis, J., Smith, S. and Owens, P. (2017) The Globalization of World Politics An Introduction to International Relations. Oxford University Press.

2015

Owens, P. (2015) Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social. Cambridge University Press.

2011

Baylis, J., Smith, S. and Owens, P. (2011) The Globalization of World Politics An Introduction to International Relations. Oxford University Press.

2009

Owens, P. (2009) Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt, pp. 1–232.

Chapters

2022

Dunstan, S. and Owens, P. (2022) “Anticolonialism”, in Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon. Cambridge University Press (CUP), pp. 187–244.

2021

Owens, P. and Rietzler, K. (2021) “Introduction: Toward a History of Women’s International Thought”, in Women’s International Thought: A New History. Cambridge University Press (CUP), pp. 1–26.

2012

Owens, P. (2012) “‘How Dangerous it Can Be to Be Innocent’: War and the Law in the Thought of Hannah Arendt”, in Hannah Arendt and the Law, pp. 251–270.

2010

Owens, P. (2010) “Walking corpses: Arendt on the limits and possibilities of cosmopolitan politics”, in International Relations Theory and Philosophy: Interpretive Dialogues, pp. 72–82.
Owens, P. (2010) “Walking corpses: Arendt on the limits and possibilities of cosmopolitan politics”, in International Relations Theory and Philosophy: Interpretive dialogues, pp. 72–82.

2009

Owens, P. (2009) “Hannah Arendt”, in Critical Theorists and International Relations, pp. 31–41.

2005

Owens, P. (2005) “Hannah Arendt: A biographical and political introduction”, in Hannah Arendt and International Relations: Readings Across the Lines, pp. 27–40.
Owens, P. (2005) “Hannah Arendt, violence, and the inescapable fact of humanity”, in Hannah Arendt and International Relations: Readings Across the Lines, pp. 41–65.

Conference Papers

2009

Owens, P. (2009) “Reclaiming ‘Bare Life’?: Against Agamben on Refugees”, in International Relations. SAGE Publications, pp. 567–582.