John Owen, A.B., M.P.A., A.M., Ph.D., is a political scientist specializing in the study of international relations. He is especially interested in how cultures and ideologies affect international politics, and vice versa.
His first book, Liberal Peace, Liberal War (Cornell University Press, 1997), and several of his articles and book chapters, advance an explanation for why liberal democracies seldom fight wars against one another. Owen also has published work on the Western canon and IR theory; the sources of American hegemony; the rationalist-constructivist divide in IR research; forcible domestic regime (e.g., democracy) promotion; and the ongoing Iraq war.
He is completing a book manuscript titled The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change 1500-2005 (forthcoming from Princeton University Press), which compares the current transnational struggle between Islamism and secularism with past such struggles, namely Catholicism v. Protestantism, republicanism v. monarchism, and communism v. fascism v. liberal democracy. He also is co-editing, with J. Judd Owen of Emory University, Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order (forthcoming from Columbia University Press), which considers whether the solutions to religious conflict proposed by the Western Enlightenment are feasible within or appropriate to non-Western religions.
Owen's vita is available here:
During the spring '09 semester, he is teaching the following course:
PLIR 700, Core Seminar in International Relations (graduate students only).His other interests include the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture; the Center for Christian Study; and Mars Hill Audio.
And he has an amateur's love of Bach, Beethoven, and, against his better judgment, Wagner.
To contact John Owen, please e-mail him at jmo4n[at]virginia.edu