Patricia Owens (academic)
Patricia Owens (born 1975) is a British-Irish academic, author and professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. She is a Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency warfare, women and the history of international thought, and the history of social and political ideas, including the thought of Hannah Arendt.
Her book Economy of Force (2015) won the 2016 Susan Strange Prize for the Best Book in international studies and the 2016 International Studies Association Theory Section Best Book Award.
Owens was born in London to Irish immigrant parents. She earned a Politics degree at Bristol University, an MPhil in International Relations from Cambridge (1998), and a PhD from Aberystwyth University (2003). She held visiting and fellowship roles at Princeton, UC Berkeley, and USC, and served as Seton-Watson Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford (2004).
Her career includes positions at Queen Mary University of London (2007–2011), UCLA as a visiting professor (2010), the University of Sussex (joined 2011), and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute (2012–2013). She became a Professor of International Relations in 2015 and headed the IR department from 2017 to 2019. In 2020 she joined Somerville College, Oxford as a Tutorial Fellow and Professor of International Relations.
Her publications include Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (2007) and Economy of Force (2015). She is co-editor of The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations (Oxford, seventh edition) and was editor of European Journal of International Relations (2013–2017). From 2018 to 2022 she was the Principal Investigator on a Leverhulme Trust project, Women and the History of International Thought.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 15:10 (CET).