Programme

The contribution will focus on a brief assessment of the activities of Czechoslovak pilots in the British Royal Air Force (RAF) during World War II and their contribution to the victory of the Allied coalition. It will also recall the tragic fate of some personalities of the Czechoslovak Air Force after February 1948, when they were persecuted and imprisoned under the communist regime. Remembering these heroes of World War II and their unbreakable attitudes is relevant today, when we see the rise to power of some aggressive regimes and their growing desire for world domination.

Although a qualified pilot, my father, Sir Nicholas Winton, did not serve in combat. His wartime contribution lay instead in training RAF pilots, and later in organising a
travelling Royal Air Force exhibition that followed closely behind Allied troops as they advanced across Europe in 1944.

Delivered at the opening of the photography exhibition by Ladislav Sitenský, this talk reflects on forms of wartime service in which organisation, communication, trust, and visual record all played a central role. It considers how the skills my father developed before the war – notably during the Kindertransport – later shaped his wartime work through coordination, persuasion, and storytelling rather than combat. A keen photographer himself, he used images of refugee children to help prospective foster families make swift, humane decisions at moments when time mattered.

Informed by my own experience of the RAF both as a cadet and student pilot, the talk offers a personal perspective on how photographs, stories, and memory together shape our understanding of service during the Second World War.

Marking the 87th anniversary of the occupation of Czechoslovakia, this keynote considers why historical patterns of insecurity feel newly relevant in a world where the
post-war rules-based international order appears increasingly fragile.

The talk draws on intergenerational conversations with my father, Sir Nicholas Winton, alongside historical reading and engagement with contemporary geopolitical debate. Rather than oVering policy prescriptions, it examines how the shocks of the early twenty-first century have challenged assumptions about international cooperation and globalisation, and considers whether these disruptions have contributed to the revival of nationalism, and a new forms of imperialism.

Rather than oVering simple conclusions, the session asks what “security” now means in a fragmented world – and whether lessons from the past can help individuals,
institutions, and nations navigate a future marked by uncertainty, moral choice, and competing narratives of power.

In an era of global architectural transformation, attention is often focused on systemic pressures and structural changes. This lecture shifts the perspective to the individual factor. The aim is to analyze how psychology, personal beliefs, and decision-making processes of leaders shape the direction of international relations in times of crisis.

Russia's war against Ukraine, together with the change in US foreign policy under Trump 2.0, has consigned the European security order (Zeitenwende), which had been forming since the end of World War II, to the history books. The lecture offers an analytical deconstruction of the old order by identifying the main layers of hard and soft security that constituted it (before Zeitenwende) and formulates questions concerning the form of the new order (after Zeitenwende), i.e., what the new order should entail, how and by whom it should be achieved so that it brings security and prosperity to European countries.

Europe's security architecture is undergoing a fundamental transformation, with the key focus on countries located in the geopolitical space between the European Union and the Russian Federation. These "intermediate" states are exposed to the simultaneous effects of two different types of external diffusion: the normative diffusion of the EU, based on the spread of the rules, institutions, and values of liberal democracy, and the coercive, including military, diffusion from Russia. Armed conflicts in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014, 2022) illustrate how fundamentally geopolitical liminality can influence issues of state sovereignty, security, and international anchoring.

The lecture will present an analytical framework of "diffusion clash," which links the actions of external actors with the changing political preferences of domestic elites. Geopolitical liminality is understood here not only as a structural constraint, but also as a condition for the formation of specific strategic cultures, characterized, among other things, by the securitization and polarization of domestic political processes.

In the context of growing geopolitical fragmentation, this approach takes on new significance, both for the European Union's ability to face asymmetric challenges through crisis management and for the debate on the EU's strategic autonomy as a prerequisite for its international relevance. The lecture will show that the changing constellations of domestic political actors and the asymmetry of the diffuse strategies of the EU and Russia throughout the 21st century are not just a regional phenomenon, but a unique causal mechanism that links the effects of external pressures with the development of the domestic political system.

Part of the physical protection of critical infrastructure involves patrols that regularly walk around the guarded object according to a predetermined route. The disadvantage of this approach is the predictability of the patrols' movements and the lower probability of timely detection of an attacker. These shortcomings can be addressed by random patrolling. The optimal random strategy defining the movement of patrols can be calculated using recently discovered algorithms based on artificial intelligence methods.

The lecture will present experiences with the deployment of random patrolling as part of the Czech Army's active reserve exercises. It will also outline the possibilities for wider use of multi-agent planning technologies applicable to autonomous robotic devices (e.g., drone swarms) and discuss related security and ethical aspects.