Centre for Studies of the Cold War and Its Consequences
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The main goal of the Centre for Studies of the Cold War and Its Consequences is to enable further advancement of Cold War studies in the Czech Republic and the increase of overall awareness of Czechoslovakia’s role in these nearly five decades of post-war history. The primary objective of the Centre is to integrate, interlink and enhance the research of the Cold War and of the role played by Czechoslovakia in the bi-polar conflict that has been done so far, and to expand the scope of this research. A number of important topics and issues dating to the period 1945–1989 need to be studied and analysed, not least for a better understanding of the present situation in numerous parts of the world, including Central and Eastern Europe.
The Centre employs scholars who specialize in the Cold War history but also external researchers who focus on the problems of the post–bipolar world. The Centre aims at regularly producing publications on both historical and recent topics, and in doing so, to bridge the gap between the research of Cold War period and that of the current international affairs.
The publications of the Centre include monographs, conference proceedings (from the conferences and workshops organized by the Centre) as well as articles in prestigious journals abroad and in the Czech Republic. As the Centre’s outreach is international, its objective is to produce a part of its publications in English, German and French in order to make them accessible to the international academic community. The outputs published in Czech should broaden, within the Czech society, our knowledge of these topics.
The Centre co-operates with the leading academic institutions in other countries (National Security Archive in Washington, D.C.; the Cold War History Research Center in Budapest; Harvard Project for Cold War Studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts) and also with many of the most important Cold War historians (Prof. Odd Arne Westad, co-director of LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics and Political Science and editor of the journal Cold War History; Dr. James Hershberg, director emeritus of the Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Prof. Anne Deighton from the University of Oxford; Georges-Henri Soutou from the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris-IV); Prof. David Holloway from the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University; Prof. Silvio Pons from Università degli Studi di Roma and many others). The Centre thus strives to be an active member of the network of international research institutions and facilities dealing with the Cold War and its consequences for the current world.
Members of the Centre: Dr. Vít Smetana (Head), Dr. Oldřich Tůma, Prof. Jiří Kocian, Dr. Doubravka Olšáková, Dr. Tomáš Vilímek, Dr. Hana Bortlová
External researchers: Dr. Jan Bečka – Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic, Doc. Jiří Vykoukal – Head of the Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Dr. Karel Svoboda – Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Dr. Jana Sehnálková – American Center in Prague, Kathleen Geaney – PhD. Candidate at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University,
Karel Sieber – Archive of the Czech TV
