Prof. Maria Mälksoo
Principal Investigator
Maria Mälksoo is Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. Her research interests cut across International Relations theory, Critical Security Studies, political anthropology and memory politics. She is the project leader of RITUAL DETERRENCE, working on NATO-Russia deterrence dynamics in the post-Cold War era, with a focus on NATO’s eastern flank and memory-political deterrence.
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Dr Cameron Hunter
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Cameron Hunter is responsible for the case study on the US-China deterrence politics in the post-Cold War era in RITUAL DETERRENCE. His research foci are critical theories of technology, outer space and nuclear systems. Cameron earned his PhD at the University of Bristol (2018) with a dissertation on The Rise of China in Space: Technopolitical Threat Construction in US Public Policy Discourse. His previous postdoc was in Prof. Andrew Futter’s The Third Nuclear Age project at the University of Leicester, UK.
Mariia Vladymyrova
Doctoral Researcher
Mariia Vladymyrova is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. Her dissertation project focuses on Russian deterrence at sea. Mariia holds a MA in War and Conflict Studies from Potsdam University, a LL.M from the European University Viadrina and a Bachelor of Laws from Dnipro National University.
Dr Thomas Fraise
Affiliated Researcher (postdoctoral level)
Thomas Fraise is an affiliated researcher in RITUAL DETERRENCE. He is a Stanton Nuclear Security post-doctoral fellow at the MIT, USA in 2023-2024 and will join the project as a full-time postdoctoral research fellow from July 2024. Thomas’s doctoral work (Restricted Democracies: Nuclear Weapons Programs, Secrecy, and Democracy in the United Kingdom, France, and Sweden, 1939-1974) was part of the Nuclear Knowledges research programme, founded by Prof. Benoît Pelopidas at Science Po, Paris.
Dr Kjølv Egeland
Visiting Researcher
Kjølv Egeland is a senior researcher at the Norwegian research institute NORSAR and a visiting researcher at the RITUAL DETERRENCE project at the University of Copenhagen. His scholarly interests centre on nuclear strategy, disarmament, and international order. Kjølv earned his DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford in 2018. Between 2019 and 2023, Kjølv was a postdoc at the Centre for International Studies at Sciences Po in Paris.
Advisory board:
Prof. Thierry Balzacq, Sciences Po, Center for International Studies, Paris, France
Dr Xymena Kurowska, Central European University, Department of International Relations, Vienna, Austria
Dr Jorg Kustermans, University of Antwerp, Department of Political Science, Antwerp, Belgium
Dr Amir Lupovici, Tel Aviv University, School of Political Science, Government and International Affairs, Tel Aviv, Israel
Prof. Jennifer Mitzen, Ohio State University, Department of Political Science, Columbus, Ohio, USA
Prof. Iver B. Neumann, Fridtjof Nansens Institute, Oslo, Norway
Prof. Juha A. Vuori, Tampere University, Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere, Finland
Prof. Harald Wydra, University of Cambridge, POLIS and St. Catharine’s College,
Cambridge, UK