We are happy to publish the new report on public support for nuclear arms control conducted by the Experimental Lab for International Security Studies (ELISS)!

The report offers results of a cross-national survey regarding public support for nuclear arms control with Russia and China, in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Poland. Furthermore, the survey included an embedded experiment investigating cross-national attitudes toward nuclear and chemical weapon use.

Tereza Plíštilová’s new policy paper describes the impact of public protests against the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, especially in the light of student demonstrations in several cities accross the US and Europe. She emphasizes the significant shift of Western public attitudes on the conflict and explains how the public-elite divide of opinion should be addressed.

We are pleased to invite you to our annual security conference, the Czech Security Forum 2024, which is organized by the Institute of International Relations Prague (IIR) and Peace Research Center Prague (PRCP). The event will take place on October 25, 2024 at Goethe-Institut Prague.

We are proud to announce that our director Michal Smetana has been awarded a five-year ERC Starting Grant of 1.5 million EUR for his project ‘Microfoundations of Collective Defence’, which will utilise advanced methods in experimental political science, international relations and political psychology to explore the public opinion in military alliances across key NATO member states.

We are pleased to welcome two new members from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, to our team at PRCP! Klára Smitková is joining as our new Office Manager while Müberra Dinler is our new postdoctoral researcher who focuses on China and Russia's support of stigmatized actors in the Middle East. Welcome!

In this publication, Michal Smetana, Marek Vranka and Ondřej Rosendorf provide empirical evidence for the hypothesis that there are substantial elite-public gaps in support for the military use of nuclear and chemical weapons. These findings strongly contribute to the ongoing academic debate on the significance of nuclear and chemical weapon ‘taboos’ in global politics.

We are happy to invite you to the official book launch of Cyber Sovereignty: The Future of Governance in Cyberspace, written by our postdoctoral researcher Lucie Kadlecová. Please do not forget to register via this form.

Our postdoctoral researcher Lucie Kadlecová is publishing her new book Cyber Sovereignty: The Future of Governance in Cyberspace. The book discusses the existence of sovereignty in cyberspace and analyzes the most advanced translatlantic cases of state sovereignty in cyberspace –⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ the Netherlands, the US, Estonia and Turkey.