Riley Owen

Riley Owen, 24, is a 2023 graduate of Princeton University, where he majored in Public and International Affairs, helped lead the Latter-Day Saints Student Association and oversaw the men’s rugby team as its president. At the university’s Center for International Security Studies, he designed and executed crisis and grand-strategy simulations based on Arctic and South China Sea scenarios. For two years, beginning in 2017, he was a missionary in Denmark, coordinating the work of 120 volunteers in communities throughout the country. In 2020 he worked as an economic policy analyst in the White House. For his senior thesis, “The End of Arctic Exceptionalism: Swedish-Finnish NATO Expansion and the Emerging Arctic Security Dilemma,” he interviewed foreign affairs and defense ministry officials in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Amid the increasing militarization of the Arctic region, at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government he looks forward to the opportunity to refine his understanding of policy issues in preparation for an eventual career in public service. At Oxford he will work on a proposal to bring security issues before the Arctic Council, the eight-country intergovernmental forum that includes the Nordic countries, Canada, the United States and Russia.

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