Prague Security Studies Institute

The Prague Security Studies Institute (PSSI) is a non-profit, nongovernmental organization established in early 2002 to advance the building of a just, secure, democratic and free-market society in the Czech Republic and other post-communist states. PSSI’s primary mission is to build an ever-growing number of informed and security-minded policy practitioners dedicated to the development and safeguarding of democratic institutions and values in the Czech Republic and its regional neighbors. PSSI works to identify and analyze select foreign policy and security-related concerns in transatlantic relations and other theaters of the world, propose sound, achievable policy responses and host regular roundtables and major conferences on these topics. PSSI is especially alert to the intersection of global finance/energy and national security considerations.

The founding of PSSI was the result of nearly five years of planning and development. In 1997, the National Security Assessments Program (NSA) was established as an entity within the Civic Institute, one of the Czech Republic’s first non-profit policy groups following the Velvet Revolution. The initial focus of the NSA Program was to enrich the national and regional debates with respect to the security-related dimensions of post-communist governance. Over a two-year period, the NSA Program made substantial progress in informing and influencing the largely underdeveloped national security policy agenda of the Czech Republic.

The NSA Program, headed by Roger W. Robinson, Jr. and Petr Vančura, convened three annual conferences, each with over 200 participants. The first conference, “NATO and Central European Security in the 21st Century” held in April 1999, was held on the fiftieth anniversary of NATO. The second conference, “A Tenth Anniversary Assessment of Central European Freedoms” in April 2000, was held to commemorate this historical development.The third, “Trans-Atlantic Missile Defense and Security Cooperation,” took place in April 2001.

Speakers from roughly eight Western and Central European countries and the US attended each of these annual conferences. The distinguished speakers included former CIA Director, James Woolsey; former US National Security Advisor, Richard Allen; US Ambassador to the Czech Republic, John Shattuck; former US Assistant Secretary of Defense, Richard Perle; prominent Soviet dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky; former Advisor to the Prime Minister of Poland, Piotr Naimsky; Air Marshal and former Chief of British Defence Intelligence, Sir John Walker; Professor of International Security Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Dr. Robert Pfaltzgraff, Jr.; German Ambassador Hagen Graf Lambsdorff; Sorbonne Prof. Francoise Thom; Director of the Institute for Strategic Studies in Bonn, Dr. Holger Mey; William F. Martin, former Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Energy.

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