European Nuclear Deterrence: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Valentina is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta. She completed a PhD in International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, where she conducted research on the Nuclear Strategic Cultures of the United States and Russia. She is the Department Contact Point within the EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium Network and is an alumnus of the Salzburg Seminars and of the Studies of the United States Institute (SUSI).

Her teaching, research and writing focus on strategic cultures, nuclear politics, the foreign and security policies of the United States and Russia, neutrality and European security and defence issues. Valentina contributed a chapter to the book Russia's War on Ukraine (Springer, 2023).

July is a PhD candidate at Swedish Defence University. She holds a Master's in International Relations and a second in International Security Studies from Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research focuses on the nuclear strategic debate, with a strong emphasis on French nuclear posture and doctrine.

July's work examines issues of nuclear legitimisation, signalling, deterrence, and the acquisition and deployment of nuclear weapons. Her PhD thesis examines the French nuclear strategic debate from the Cold War to today.

Linde is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University. Her research focuses on nuclear weapons politics – particularly strategies in the space between conventional war and full-scale nuclear exchange – and transatlantic security, with an emphasis on the role of the United States in European security, NATO, and alliance dynamics.

She has held fellowships at the MIT Security Studies Program and Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in, Nonproliferation Review, Journal of European Integration, International Politics, Journal of Strategic Studies, Survival, Washington Quarterly, Defence Studies, Strategic Studies Quarterly, European Security, and International Studies Review.

Monika is an Assistant Professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is also a visiting fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence. Her research interests focus primarily on international relations, with a particular emphasis on European and transatlantic security cooperation, as well as the European Union’s foreign, security, and defence policy.

She has served as the principal investigator of several research projects and was recently the Work Package Leader in the Horizon 2020 project ENGAGE: Envisioning a New Governance Architecture for a Global Europe. Monika has published widely on EU foreign and security policy, and her articles have appeared in West European Politics, International Affairs, Journal of Common Market Studies, Contemporary Security Policy, The Nonproliferation Journal, Geopolitics, Journal of European Integration, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Global Policy, and European Security.

Mahmoud is Series Editor of The Loop's Nuclear Politics Paradox series and Doctoral Researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is also involved in the European Research Council-funded project Competition in the Digital Era: Geopolitics and Technology in the 21st Century.

Prior to this, he was an AI Governance Researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam, on the EU-funded research consortium Reignite Multilateralism via Technology. He also has experience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his research focused on EU external relations.

Mahmoud has several publications to his name, including the co-authored book The European Union’s Knowledge Economy, published in Farsi by the University of Tehran Press in 2018. His forthcoming monograph will explore the universalisation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. He holds a Master of Arts in Transnational Governance from the European University Institute in Florence.