Jowitt also spent some of his post-graduate life in Romania during the Ceauşescu regime, where he studied the political and cultural dynamics of post-Stalinist Communist Europe.
Among other honors and forms of recognition, he won the University Distinguished Teaching Award in 1983, and has been the recipient of two Stanford Hoover fellowships.
One of Jowitt's more notable scholarly works is New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, a collection of essays written between 1974 and 1990 that focuses on the nature of Communist regimes.
[3] Jowitt has taken what some would consider a qualified, anti-Wilsonian stance with respect to the Global War on Terror, and criticizing—both in print and during public debates—writers such as David Frum, who have articulated a desire for the United States to change the Middle East into a more pluralistic, democratic region, primarily through military intervention.
[4] Although he initially supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he later became a critic of what he viewed as an unwillingness on the part of the Bush administration to implement a "realist" foreign policy, especially with respect to the Middle East and the ongoing War on Terror.