Team
Prof. Benoît Pelopidas (PhD) founded the program Nuclear Knowledges and holds the chair of excellence in security studies at CERI (Sciences Po). He is also an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University and has been a frequent visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security.
In France, Nuclear Knowledges is the first scholarly research program on the nuclear phenomenon, which is fully independent and transparent on its funding sources.
He has been awarded four international prizes for his research. In 2017, he has been awarded one of the most competitive EU grants: an ERC Starting Grant (1,5 million € over five years) on nuclear weapons choices.
He focuses on the construction of knowledge about nuclear weapons, their institutional, conceptual, imaginal and memorial underpinnings. Conceptually, he elaborates nuclear vulnerability beyond its material and strategic dimensions. Empirically, Benoit’s focus is on nuclear “close calls”, crisis management and French nuclear history.
Over the last seven years, he has been engaging with policymaking elites in the US and Europe as well as civil society groups to advocate innovative nuclear disarmament and arms control policies.
Since 2013, he has been coordinating a team of 13 international researchers to write the first global history of the so-called "Cuban Missile Crisis" based on primary sources worlwide, which revisits fundamental concepts of IR and security studies such as the nuclear revolution, power, sovereignty, neutrality and alliance dynamics.
Sterre van Buuren has been a research assistant at the Nuclear Knowledges program since June 2023. Her research focuses on the compatibility of nuclear weapons and democracy. Sterre holds a BA in International Studies from Leiden University and an MA in International Security from Sciences Po.
Roxana currently coordinates, with Benoit, the activities of the Nuclear Knowledges program. She holds a Master degree in Strategic Management from Paris X - HEC - ESSEC. Before joining the Center for International Relations (CERI) in 2004, she worked for the Romanian Ministry of Education, the French Ministry of Justice and the French Agency for the Development and Coordination of International Relations in the field of social protection. She has extensive experience in managing large international projects as well as in preparing project proposals for different European and international funding institutions.
Austin R. Cooper is an Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University and Senior Research Associate at SciencesPo CERI. He is finishing a book about France’s emergence as a nuclear weapon state during the 1960s and its first nuclear testing program in the Algerian Sahara at that time. He has published related work in the Nonproliferation Review and Cold War History. He completed fellowships in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He earned a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Thomas Fraise is an associate researcher with the Nuclear Knowledges program. He is a postdoctoral researcher in the EU-funded Ritual Deterrence project at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He holds a Ph.D in international relations from Sciences Po, where he was part of the Nuclear Knowledges team, and was previously a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Security Studies Program). He is currently working on a book project entitled Restricted Democracies: Nuclear Weapons, Secrecy and Democracy, and on a project on NATO deterrence during the Cold War.
Dr Hebatalla Taha is an affiliated scholar with the Nuclear Knowledges program as well as Associate Senior Lecturer at Lund University. Her work focuses on the intellectual history of categories used to make sense of nuclear realities and possibilities in the Middle East in the post-Cold War context. Her broader research interests include political economy, anthropology of development, as well as peace, conflict, and insecurity. She completed a DPhil (2017) and MPhil in Modern Middle East Studies (2013) at the University of Oxford.
