Michal Smetana is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Director of the Peace Research Center Prague (PRCP), Head Researcher at the Experimental Lab for International Security Studies (ELISS), and a Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) project “Microfoundations of Collective Defence” (MICROCODE). Previously, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University, anda 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, norm contestation, frozen conflicts, and public opinion. His articles have been published in Security Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Affairs, Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Review, Contemporary Security Policy, Research & Politics, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Interactions, Survival, The Washington Quarterly, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and many other scholarly and policy journals. He is the author of Nuclear Deviance. 

Contested Nuclear Taboo in the Third Nuclear Age
Over the past decade, we have seen growing concerns that the renewed great power competition and the increasing salience of nuclear weapons in world politics could eventually lead to the erosion of the international norm against nuclear use—the “nuclear taboo.” The most prominent development widely seen as damaging to the nuclear taboo has been Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a military campaign accompanied by the Kremlin’s nuclear saber-rattling and persistent Western concerns about nuclear escalation. In my new book, I present the argument that while intense Russian nuclear signaling and other patterns of irresponsible nuclear behavior have opened the “contestation space” with respect to the validity and meaning of the nuclear nonuse norm, they are by themselves poor indicators of the erosion of the nuclear taboo. Building on an innovative conceptual framework from interactionist sociology and social psychology, I show how the international response to Moscow’s nuclear threats ultimately led to the reaffirmation of the nuclear taboo as one of the key prohibitory norms in world politics rather than to its weakening or disappearance. In addition to tracing the dynamics on the “macro-level” of international politics, I also present new “micro-level” data from cross-national surveys and survey experiments demonstrating that we do not witness any patterns of the taboo disappearing from world politics. However, I also show that the nuclear nonuse norm continues to be predominantly an “elite taboo,” with much of the world’s population internalizing it to a much lower extent than their political representatives. The findings of the book on both the “macro” and “micro” levels of world politics provide a new understanding of how the international norm against nuclear use operates at the onset of the third nuclear age.