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.

Reid Pauly is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University and the Dean’s Assistant Professor of Nuclear Security and Policy at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs. He studies nuclear proliferation and nuclear strategy, coercion, secrecy in international politics, and wargaming. Pauly is the author of The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma (Cornell University Press, 2025). His scholarship has also been published in International Security, International Studies Quarterly, the European Journal of International Relations, and Foreign Affairs. Pauly earned his Ph.D. from MIT and has held fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Schmidt Futures International Strategy Forum, and Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center for International Understanding. 

Xinru Ma’s research focuses on nationalism, great power politics, and East Asian security with a methodological focus on formal and computational methods. More broadly, Xinru’s research encompasses three main objectives: Substantively, she aims to better theorize and enhance cross-country perspectives on critical phenomena such as nationalism and its impact on international security; Methodologically, she strives to improve measurement and causal inference based on careful methodologies, including formal modeling and computational methods like natural language processing; Empirically, she challenges prevailing assumptions that inflate the perceived risk of militarized conflicts in East Asia, by providing original data and analysis rooted in local knowledge and regional perceptions.

She is the co-author of Beyond Power Transitions: The Lessons of East Asian History and the Future of U.S.-China Relations (Columbia University Press, 2024). Her work has been published in the Journal of East Asian Studies, The Washington Quarterly, the Journal of Global Security Studies, and the Journal of European Public Policy, and in edited volumes via Palgrave. 

At SNAPL, Xinru will lead the research group in collaborative projects that focus on US-Asia relations. One of the projects will contrast the rhetoric and debates in US politics surrounding the historical phenomenon of "Japan bashing" and the current perception of a "China threat.” By applying automated text analysis and qualitative analysis to public opinion data and textual data from various sources, such as congressional hearings and presidential speeches, this project uncovers the similarities, differences, and underlying factors driving the narratives and public discourse surrounding US-Asia relations. She will also provide mentorship to student research assistants and research associates. 

Before joining SNAPL, Xinru was an assistant professor at the School of International Relations and Diplomacy at Beijing Foreign Studies University, where she led the Political Science Research Lab, a lab committed to closing the gender gap in computational methods and political science research by offering big-data methods training and professionalization workshops to students. Before that, Xinru was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University (2019-2020) and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University (2018-2019). In 2023, Xinru was selected as an International Strategy Forum fellow by Schmidt Futures, an initiative that recognizes the next generation of problem solvers with extraordinary potential in geopolitics, innovation, and public leadership. 

Dr. Melissa K. Griffith is a Lecturer in Technology and National Security at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) as well as affiliated faculty with the Alperovitch Institute and a senior advisor to the Emerging Technologies Initiative. From cybersecurity to tech security, she works at the intersection between technology, national security, and economic statecraft with a specialization in cybersecurity, semiconductors, and machine learning/artificial intelligence. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins SAIS, Griffith was the Director of Emerging Technology and National Security and a Senior Program Associate with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program (STIP); a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC); a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University's Institute for International Science and Technology Policy (IISTP); a Visiting Research Fellow at the Research Institute on the Finnish Economy (ETLA) in Helsinki, Finland; and a Visiting Researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels, Belgium. Griffith holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. in International Relations from Agnes Scott College.

For additional information (including a comprehensive list of publications, prior positions and affiliations, presentations and public appearances, and teaching experience) please visit www.melissakgriffith.com.

Dr. Melissa Carlson is currently working with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency's Assessment, Monitoring, and Evaluation unit, where she promotes rigorous standards of measuring the effectiveness of the U.S.'s security cooperation and assistance programming. During her tenure at CISAC, she was a postdoctoral research and teaching fellow. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in international relations, comparative politics, and methodology. Dr. Carlson's primary research examines the factors that influence the variation and intensity of partnerships between governments and foreign militant groups with a focus on the recent conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Her book-style dissertation project finds that, when foreign militant groups and state armed forces share similar organizational characteristics, they are more likely to deploy forces to conduct joint combat operations and provide each other with advanced weapons systems. In other research, Dr. Carlson examines the factors that influence informal and secret security cooperation between states and how misinformation and rumors influence refugees' relationships with host governments, service providers, and smugglers. Her research has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Review of International Organizations, and International Studies Quarterly, among other outlets. Outside of academia, Dr. Carlson has worked as a consultant for the International Organization for Migration's Iraq and Jordan Missions.

Dr. Lauren J. Borja is fellow at the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She is also an affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Her research focuses on high energy laser directed energy weapons. Specifically, Dr. Borja investigates the implications of the range of their possible uses from tactical to space to missile defense. She is also interested in issues in emerging technology and the role of science and technology in national security. She was a 2019–2020 Stanton Nuclear Security postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and a Simons postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs from 2017–2019. In 2016, she received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in physical chemistry. She was part of the NSquare Innovators Network (Cohort 3).