Internal researchers
Prof. Oldrich Bures
Email: oldrich.bures@mup.cz
Professor Bures is the founding director of the Center for Security Studies and Professor of International Political Relations at Metropolitan University Prague. He also lectures at the Department of Security Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague. From 2021 till 2026, he is a Visiting Professor at the University of South Wales. From 2009 till 2018, he was the Head of the Department of International Relations and European Studies at Metropolitan University Prague. He was previously a senior lecturer at Palacky University; a Fulbright Fellow at the Joan. B. Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame; an External Research Fellow at the Centre for European Security, School of English, Sociology, Politics & Contemporary History, University of Salford; and a Marie Curie COFUND Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Hazzard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University. His research is focused on Conflict Resolution and International Security, with special emphasis on the privatization of security, (counter-)terrorism, and securitization of migration. He was awarded several external research grants, including the European Commission, the Czech Science Foundation, and the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic. He currently participates in the Jean Monnet research-led excellence network on EU counter-terrorism (EUCTER), the Globalization, Illicit Trade, Sustainability and Security (GLITSS) COST Action, and he is a co-founder of the Private Security Network (PrivSecNet). He serves as an evaluator of the European Research Executive Agency, the Czech Science Agency, the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, and the Czech and Slovak national higher education accreditation institutions.
His work has been published in Security Dialogue, Cooperation and Conflict, Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, International Studies Review, International Peacekeeping, Intelligence and National Security, European Security, Global Governance, Problems of Post-Communism, Population, Space and Place, Population and Development Review and Journal of Business Ethics, among other key journals. He is the author of several monographs, including EU Counterterrorism Policy: A Paper Tiger? (Ashgate, 2011) and Private Security Companies: Transforming Politics and Security in the Czech Republic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and (co-)editor of several edited volumes, including A Decade of EU Counter-Terrorism and Intelligence: A Critical Assessment (Routledge 2017) and Security Privatization: How Non-security-related Private Businesses Shape Security Governance (Springer 2018). He also has an extensive record of media appearances. He has considerable experience in organizing both research and science-popularising events, as evidenced by the numerous seminar series, workshops, and international conferences that he (co-) organized.
Beyond academia, his expertise has been utilized, including cooperation, advising, and consulting with/for Czech security forces and several Czech government Ministries, particularly Interior; Defence; Foreign Affairs; Education, Youth, and Sports; and Labor and Social Affairs. He has also worked as an external conflict resolution trainer and consultant for the largest Czech humanitarian NGO People in Need.
Prof. Nikola Hynek
Email: nik.hynek@mup.cz
Professor Nik Hynek studied political science and international relations at the Masaryk University, the University of Plymouth, and the University of Bradford where he received his research doctorate degree in Security Studies and International Politics (2011). Currently he holds the title of Associate Professor (docent) after he received his habilitation at the Comenius University in Bratislava in Theory of Politics (2013). Apart from the Department of International Relations FSV UK he also works at the Metropolitan University Prague; in the past, he also worked at the Institute of International Relations in Prague where he founded and directed a research centre on security. He was a visiting research scholar at the Columbia University in New York and The London School of Economist and Political Science. Also, he was Associate Editor of the Journal of International Relations and Development (Palgrave Macmillan).
Aleš Karmazin, Ph.D.
Email: ales.karmazin@gmail.com
Aleš Karmazin is an assistant professor at the Department of Asian Studies, Metropolitan University Prague and an external fellow at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague. He has received his Master’s degrees in China studies from LSE and IR from Aberystwyth and PhD in IR from Charles University. He also works as the Editor-in-Chief of the Central European Journal of International and Security Studies (www.cejiss.org) and is the founder and the first-ever co-chair of the Czech Association of Contemporary Asian Studies (https://cacas.cz/). He has been interested in analysing political order in its different variations from the level of international society (English School of IR, constructivism, sovereignty) to the domestic level (institutional and ideational mechanisms of governance). Also, he has been dealing with the role of technology in politics, which he approaches as yet another aspect related to political order. He analyses these questions with respect to China (domestic and foreign policy), India (foreign policy), East Asia and global order.
Associate Prof. Michal Kolmaš
Email: michal.kolmas@gmail.com
Michal Kolmaš is an Associate Professor and the head of the Asian studies department at Metropolitan University Prague, and the editor-in-chief of the Czech Journal of International Relations (cjir.iir.cz). He graduated in International Relations from Masaryk University Prague and received a doctorate from Charles University Prague. During that time, he spent two years as a researcher in Japan. In 2017, he served as visiting fellow at the Ritsumeikan Asia-Pacific University in Beppu, in 2018 he was a visiting fellow at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Between 2021 and 2022, he was a fellow at University of Massachusetts in Boston, USA. He focuses on climate change in international politics, security in Asia, Japanese domestic and foreign politics and theories/methods of research in IR. His works were published in the most prestigious journals including Global Environmental Politics, The Pacific Review, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Japanese Journal of Political Science, Social Science Japan Journal, Australian Journal of International Affairs, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific and others. His latest authored monograph titled National identity and Japanese revisionism was published by Routledge in 2019. He was the recipient of several grant projects, including a few Czech Science Foundation projects, an ERA grant and one Japan Foundation grant. Currently, he is the co-investigator of a CSF project “Under Pressure: Crisis, emotions and political transformations around climate change” (2022-2024).
Sarka Kolmasova, Ph.D.
Email: sarka.kolmasova@mup.cz
Šárka Kolmašová is the Deputy Head of the Department of International Relations and European Studies at the Metopolitan University Prague, where she also gives lectures in the field of global security and international protection of human rights. Since 2014, she is a member of the Peacebuilding and Postwar-Reconstruction Commission of the International Peace Research Association. In 2008-2012, she was a research fellow of the Institute of International Relations, Prague. Furthermore, she was an external lecturer of the Department of Political Science at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, Charles University in Prague, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Hradec Králové. In 2012-2015, she was the head researcher of the post-doctoral project funded by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR), entitled Significance of Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect: the Case of Libya and Syria. In the past, she was participating in several other research projects, including the Network of Cooperation in the Field of Non-European Areas (RESAREAS), funded by the European Social Fund in the CR. Within this project, she was a short-term visiting scholar of the Canter for Peace Research at the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. In her research, she is focusing on humanitarian interventions and the concept of the Responsibility to Protect, armed conflicts resolution, and particularly protection of civilians in serious crisis situations. In addition, she is doing research on the Czech Foreign Policy of the Czech Republic and especially its multilateral dimension. She is the author of the book Metamorphoses of the Humanitarian Intervention Concept: from Rwanda to Libya (2016) and the co-author of the collective monograph Czech Republic in international organizations (2015). Together with Petr Drulák, she co-edited the publication Non-Western Reflection on Politics, including her own chapter on the Zapatistas movement in Mexico. She further published several academic articles in peer-reviewed journals, including recently published: „Inconsistencies between Libya and Syria? Pragmatic Revisionism and the Responsibility to Protect“ (in Central European Journal of International and Security Studies, 2016). Together with Kateřina Krulišová she is preparing a research article on legitimization strategies through sexual(ized) violence in military interventions implemented in Libya and Mali.
Ricardo Reboredo, Ph.D.
Email: ricardo.reboredo@mup.cz
Ricardo Reboredo is an assistant professor of International Relations at Metropolitan University Prague. He received M.A. from the University of Miami and his Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin, both in Geography. His research interests include globalization, Sino-African relations, and the political economy of development. His work has been published in journals such as Area Development and Policy, Urban Forum, Review of African Political Economy, African Geographical Review, and China Perspectives, among others. He has also recently co-authored a book titled Africa’s Shadow Rise: China and the Mirage of African Economic Development and is a co-editor on another title, Norm Diffusion Beyond the West: Agents and Sources of Leverage which will be published in 2023.
Post-Docs
Christine Andreeva, PhD
Email: christine.andreeva@mup.cz
Christine Andreeva recently successfully defended her PhD at Dublin City University (DCU) on “EU Counter-terrorism’s Gradual Institutionalisation: Information-sharing and Cooperation in Law Enforcement and Intelligence Post-2015”. She has published articles with Global Affairs, ERA Forum and the Bulgarian Association for European law on the topic of EU harmonisation and institutionalisation measures in counter-terrorism after 2015. Her research has aimed to demonstrate the qualitative shift in EU counter-terrorism post-2015, as compared to previous critical junctures, such as the one after the Madrid and London attacks in 2004-2005. She has presented her research at academic conferences focused on EU integration and security topics. Christine previously studied European integration with focus on EU security policies in her Master studies at the Institute of European Studies in Brussels, and worked in the European Parliament as a policy advisor to an MEP. Since October 2021, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Security Studies, and is currently working on a publication discussing the impact of Brexit on EU counter-terrorism cooperation in intelligence and law enforcement.
Jonata Anicetti, PhD
Email: jonata.anicetti@mup.cz
External research fellows
Alexandr Burilkov, Dr.phil.
Email: alexandr.burilkov@mup.cz
Alexandr Burilkov completed his PhD on maritime security in the Western Pacific and the Persian Gulf at the University of Hamburg in 2017. He was previously a junior research fellow at the GIGA Hamburg. His research focuses on innovation in military strategy, the role of non-state proxy groups in foreign policy, and the security environment in the Western Pacific and the post-Soviet space; recently he has completed “Russian Maritime Strategy since the Ukrainian Crisis”, a chapter in an upcoming two-part volume on maritime security to be published by Routledge. He also participates in research focused on the quantitative analysis of the processes of influence and diffusion in regional organizations, especially using spatial and temporal methods; his most recent work in this theme, coathored with Tobias Lenz, is “Institutional pioneers in world politics: Regional institution building and the influence of the European Union” (EJIR 2016).
Robert Fischer
Email: fischer@c4ss.cz
Dr. Veronika Frantova
Veronika Frantová is an external collaborator with the MUP. She is also an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Science, Humanities and Education at the Technical University of Liberec. She holds a PhD in Sociology at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, where she also works as a researcher on a research grant co-organized by the MUP. Her main interests are cultural sociology, discourse analysis, culture wars, and civil society studies. She has participated in various research projects where she conducted narrative and media discourse analysis.
Dr. Katerina Krulisova
Email: katerina.krulisova@mup.cz
Katerina is a senior lecturer at the Security and Technology of Communication Departement, teaching also at International Relations and European Studies departments (in both Czech and English versions) at MUP. Katerina’s main research interests are Gender in Security Studies, and R2P and Sexual(ised) Violence in Conflicts. She is completing her PhD candidacy at Nottingham Trent University, UK, in 2017, focusing on Female Protagonist of Sexual(ised) Violence in Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia from a post-structural perspective. In the past, Katerina has been invited to Brown University for a research gathering at BIARI Programme on Ethnicity, Conflict, and Inequality in Global Perspective, funded by Santander Universities. She has published on the topics of female self-martyrs in Chechnya, and sexual(ised) violence in armed conflicts. The latest publications include The “Black Widow” Media Discourse: “Desperation, Irrationality and Vendetta” in Dagestan published in CEJISS, e-chapter on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict: A Weapon of War? published at interdisciplinary.net and a number of review articles. In research collaboration with Sarka Kolmasova, the article on R2P and Sexual(ised) Violence Discourses and Legitimisations is forthcoming. At the moment, Katerina is working on her monograph on Female Protagonist of Political Violence and International Legal and Media Discourses, and further develops her R2P analysis together with her colleagues.
Dr. Prem Mahadevan
Email: mahadevan@hotmail.co.uk
Jeremy Meyer
Email: jeremymeyer90@gmail.com
Maj. Jan Měřička, Ph.D.
Prof. Dr. Ing. Zbyněk Raida
Zbynek Raida is professor at the Department of Radio Electronics, Brno University of Technology, and the Department of Security Studies at Metropolitan University Prague. From 1996 to 1997, he was with Laboratoire de Hyperfrequences, Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) researching variational methods for the analysis of electromagnetic structures. At present, his research and education activities have been focused on electromagnetic fields and their exploitation for wireless transmission of information. Being engaged in C4SS activities, the current research has been directed towards securing wireless communication in the physical layer of the communication system.
Dr. Vit Stritecky
Vít Střítecký is an assistant professor in international security at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. He studied security and IR programs at the Charles University, Uppsala University, Sweden and University of St. Andrews, Scotland. In his research as well as academic management activities he gradually focuses on the interplay between security and technology which has resulted in two interdisciplinary security programs and large project proposal connecting security experts across the social science, natural science, medical and technical fields. On top of his academic activities he holds a position of the member of the Executive Committee responsible for R&D&I of the Technological Platform Energy Security, which is a leading regional public-private-partnership project in the area of critical infrastructure protection. He has written several expert reports focusing on security and defence policy and defence industrial policy (MFA, European Parliament, Defence and Security Industry Association of the Czech Republic) and his academic publications include numerous articles (Communist and Post-Communist Studies, European Security, Osteuropa) and book chapters as well as four research monographs. He currently works on a book looking at the role of defence industry in shaping the EU security and defence policies and together with Petr Špelda further develops computer assisted analyses of large data sets, mainly in the areas of propaganda or conspiracies.
Izabela Surwillo, Ph.D.
Email: izabela.surwillo@mup.cz
Izabela Surwillo earned her PhD in International Relations from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She received a master’s degree in International Relations from the University of St Andrews, UK and a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the University of Leicester, UK. She was a visiting researcher at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University College London, UK and a visiting researcher at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine. She was also a visiting research fellow at the Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany. As a part of her global teaching fellowship awarded by the Central European University she held a post of a visiting lecturer at the Univates University in Lajeado, Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil. She is a co-author (with K. Henderson and G. Lazaridis) of ‚Between Euroscepticism and Eurosupport: the attitudes of urban and rural populations in Poland 2000-2008’ (Europe-Asia Studies, 2010). Her current research interests include international relations theory, security studies and energy security. She is currently working on the paper in the area of critical security studies and on a book monograph on energy governance in the CEE region.
Dr. Petr Špelda
Petr Špelda received his PhD. at the Department of International Relations, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. He is a lecturer at the Department of Security Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. He submitted his dissertation titled Pictorial Possible Worlds proposing a synthesis of philosophical devices of the analytic tradition with computational approaches to cognition. His current research concentrates on various aspects of the human-machine nexus including philosophical debates regarding the contemporary developments in the field of representation learning and thus of the Artificial Intelligence in general. His empirical facing research comprised of developing computational methods that would contribute towards better understanding of the online political extremism. In this regard, he specialized in topics concerning the visual propaganda of the Islamic State and of the broader Sunni jihadist milieu. He presented his work at several conferences including ECPR Graduate Student Conference, ISA Annual Convention, and the Vox-Pol Mid-Project Conference.
Daniel Urbánek
Michal Vít, Ph.D.
Student research assistants
Zuzana Měřičková
Gregorio Staglianò
