Michal Smetana

Michal Smetana is an Associate Professor at the Institute of International Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Director of the Peace Research Center Prague (PRCP), and Head Researcher at the Experimental Lab for International Security Studies (ELISS). Previously, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). His main research interests lie at the intersection of security studies, international relations, and political psychology, with a specific focus on nuclear weapons in world politics, arms control and disarmament, contestation of international norms, and the use of experimental survey methodology to study public and elite attitudes towards foreign policy. His articles have been published in International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Affairs, Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Review, Contemporary Security Policy, Survival, Conflict Management and Peace Science, and many other scholarly and policy journals. He is the author of Nuclear Deviance. In addition to his academic work, he is frequently invited to talk about international security matters in the media and conducts policy analyses for NATO, the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Czech Ministry of Interior. 

Selected publications:

Michal Smetana. 2023. Microfoundations of Domestic Audience Costs in Nondemocratic Regimes: Experimental Evidence from Putin’s Russia. Journal of Peace Research. Forthcoming in 2023.

Ondrej Rosendorf, Michal Smetana, and Marek Vranka. 2023. “Algorithmic Aversion? Experimental Evidence on the Elasticity of Public Attitudes to ‘Killer Robots’” Security Studies. Forthcoming in 2023.

Michal Smetana, Marek Vranka, and Ondrej Rosendorf. 2023. “The “Commitment Trap” Revisited: Experimental Evidence on Ambiguous Nuclear Threats.” Journal of Experimental Political Science. First view: March 2023, 1–14.

Michal Smetana and Michal Onderco. 2023. “From Moscow with a Mushroom Cloud? Russian Public Attitudes to the Use of Nuclear Weapons in a Conflict with NATO.” Journal of Conflict Resolution. 67(2–3), 183–209.

Michal Smetana, Marek Vranka, and Ondrej Rosendorf. 2023. “The Lesser Evil? Experimental Evidence on the Strength of Nuclear and Chemical Weapon “Taboos.” Conflict Management and Peace Science. 40(1), 3–21.

Michal Onderco, Michal Smetana, and Tom Etienne. 2023. “Hawks in the making? European public views on nuclear weapons post-Ukraine.” Global Policy. 14(2), 305–317.

Michal Smetana and Michal Onderco. 2022. “Elite-Public Gaps in Attitudes to Nuclear Weapons: New Evidence from a Survey of German Citizens and Parliamentarians.” International Studies Quarterly. 66(2), 1–10.

Michal Smetana and Joseph O’Mahoney. 2022. “NPT as an Antifragile System: How Contestation Improves the Nonproliferation Regime.” Contemporary Security Policy. 43(1), 24–49.

Michal Onderco, Tom Etienne, and Michal Smetana. 2022. “Ideology and the Red Button: How Ideology Shapes Nuclear Weapons Use Preferences in Europe.” Foreign Policy Analysis. 18(4), 1–20.

Ondrej Rosendorf, Michal Smetana, and Marek Vranka. 2022. “Autonomous Weapons and Ethical Judgments: Experimental Evidence on Attitudes towards the Military Use of ‘Killer Robots.’” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. 28(2), 177–183.

Ondrej Rosendorf, Michal Smetana, and Marek Vranka. 2021. “Disarming Arguments: Public Opinion and Nuclear Abolition.” Survival. 63(6), 183–200.

Michal Smetana and Carmen Wunderlich. 2021. “Forum: Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons in World Politics: Toward the Third Generation of ‘Nuclear Taboo’ Research.” International Studies Review. 23(3), 1072–1099.

Kamil Klosek, Vojtech Bahensky, Michal Smetana, and Jan Ludvik. 2021. “Frozen Conflicts in World Politics: A New Dataset.” Journal of Peace Research. 58(4), 849–858.

Michal Smetana, Michal Onderco, and Tom Etienne. 2021. “Do Germany and the Netherlands Want to Say Goodbye to US Nuclear Weapons?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 77(4), 215–221.

Michal Onderco and Michal Smetana. 2021. “German Views on US Nuclear Weapons in Europe: Public and Elite Perspectives.” European Security. 30(4), 630–648.

Michal Smetana and Marek Vranka. 2021. “How Moral Foundations Shape Public Approval of Nuclear, Chemical, and Conventional Strikes: New Evidence from Experimental Surveys.” International Interactions. 47(2), 374–390. 

Michal Onderco, Michal Smetana, Sico van der Meer, and Tom Etienne. 2021. “When do the Dutch Want to Join the Nuclear Ban Treaty? Findings of a Public Opinion Survey.” The Nonproliferation Review. 28(1–3), 149–163.

Hana Martinkova and Michal Smetana. 2020. “Dynamics of Norm Contestation in the Chemical Weapons Convention: The Case of ‘Non-lethal Agents.’” Politics. 40(4), 428–443.

Michal Smetana. 2020. “(De-)stigmatising the outsider: nuclear-armed India, United States, and the global nonproliferation order.” Journal of International Relations and Development. 23, 535–558.

Michal Smetana and Jan Ludvík. 2019. “Theorising Indirect Coercion: The Logic of Triangular Strategies.” International Relations. 33(3), 455–474.

Michal Smetana and Jan Ludvík. 2019. “Between War and Peace: A Dynamic Reconceptualization of ‘Frozen Conflicts.’” Asia-Europe Journal. 17(1), 1–14.

Sumit Ganguly, Michal Smetana, Sannia Abdullah, and Ales Karmazin. 2019. “India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir Dispute: Unpacking the Dynamics of South Asian Frozen Conflict.” Asia-Europe Journal. 17(1), 129–143.

Michal Smetana and Michal Onderco. 2018. “Bringing the Outsiders in: An Interactionist Perspective on Deviance and Normative Change.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs. 31(6), 516–536.

Michal Smetana. 2018. “A Nuclear Posture Review for the Third Nuclear Age.” The Washington Quarterly. 41(3), 137–157.

Michal Smetana. 2018. “The Prague Agenda: An Obituary?” New Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Journal of Central & East European Politics and International Relations. 26(1), 16–22.

Michal Smetana and Jan Ludvík. 2017. “Correspondence – Nuclear Proliferation, Preventive Strikes, and the Optimist-Pessimist Divide.” The Nonproliferation Review. 23(5–6), 535–536. 

Michal Smetana. 2016. “Stuck on Disarmament: The European Union and the 2015 NPT Review Conference.” International Affairs. 92(1), 137–152.

Michal Smetana and Ondrej Ditrych. 2015. “The More the Merrier: Time for a Multilateral Turn in Nuclear Disarmament.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 71(3), 30–37.