Postgraduate research students

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

Within the University of Glasgow, Sterre works with the Atomic Anxiety team headed by Rhys Crilley. 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 Belgium and the Netherlands.

• Sterre van Buuren. "The Arsenal and the Ballot Box: Scoping the Incompatibility of Nuclear Weapons and Democracy." Perspectives on Politics (2025): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724002664

• Sterre van Buuren, Thomas Fraise, and Benoît Pelopidas. "Existential silos: the compartmentalization of the futures of environmental change and the nuclear threat." Futures 173 (October 2025), 103671. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2025.103671

• Sterre van Buuren, Benoît Pelopidas and Alexander Sorg. "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. https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136251353234

• Sterre van Buuren, Thomas Fraise, and Benoît Pelopidas. "Armes nucléaires et environnement." Raison Présente 230, no.2 (2025): 97-104. https://doi.org/10.3917/rpre.230.0097

• Dr Rhys Crilley
• Dr Maha Rafi Atal