Postgraduate research students

Sterre van Buuren is a first-year PhD student in Politics and International Relations. Her PhD research investigates the participation of private actors in nuclear weapons politics in France and the UK since the end of the Cold War. Sterre's broader interests revolve around the governance of nuclear weapons and other existential risks, and particularly their intersection with democracy.

She is also an affiliated doctoral researcher with Sciences Po's Nuclear Knowledges and a research assistant on its project "The Bureaucratic Politics of Nuclear Alliance Management", funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In this role, she studies the politics of Extended Nuclear Deterrence in the Netherlands. 

Sterre is a member of the British-American Security Information Council's Emerging Voices Network and a 2025 Atomic Anxiety fellow. 

Publications

• “Nuclear Memories for the Future: Gaps and Forgetting in European Publics’ Understandings of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Thesis Eleven 189, no.1 (2025): 37–53. (With Benoît Pelopidas and Alexander Sorg)
• “Existential Silos: The Compartmentalization of the Futures of Environmental Change and the Nuclear Threat,” Futures 173 (October 2025), 103671. (With Thomas Fraise and Benoît Pelopidas)
• “The Arsenal and the Ballot Box: Scoping the Incompatibility of Nuclear Weapons and Democracy,” Perspectives on Politics (2025), 1–18.
• “Armes nucléaires et environnement,” Raison Présente 230, no.2 (2024): 97–104. (With Thomas Fraise and Benoît Pelopidas)

Prior publications

• Dr Rhys Crilley
• Dr Maha Rafi Atal