CENTREPEACE Organized the Summer School Energy Policy and Security of the EU

Few topics cut as close to the heart of European security today as energy. Where the electricity comes from, who controls the pipelines, what happens to a continent when a familiar supplier turns hostile, these are no longer abstract policy puzzles but daily political realities. Over two intensive weeks this July, the summer school Energy Policy and Security of the EU invited students to sit with those realities, and to think through them alongside some of the people who study and shape them.

Organized by the CENTREPEACE project together with Masaryk University, the program brought together an international group of students for morning sessions that moved briskly from the fundamentals to the frontier of the field. The curriculum assumed no technical background, but it did not shy away from complexity.

The first week built the foundations. Jan Osička opened with the deceptively simple question of who actually makes EU energy policy, and how, before guiding participants through the tangled landscape of the energy transition, electricity markets, and the challenges of decarbonization. Theory gave way to practice in a hands-on electricity trading simulation, where students felt for themselves how markets behave when the ground keeps shifting beneath them. Václav Bartuška, drawing on his experience as an energy diplomat, brought the stakes into sharp focus with a session on energy security in wartime.

From there the program turned to the fault lines of the recent past and present. Tomáš Vlček dissected the European energy crisis, its causes, its manifestations, and the search for solutions, and mapped the oil and nuclear fuel supply patterns that define Central and Eastern Europe's particular vulnerabilities. Lukáš Lehotský examined the long road of coal phase-out and the local resistance that so often meets it, a reminder that energy transitions are not only fought in ministries but in the communities that live beside the infrastructure. Martin Jirušek closed the week by situating the whole picture within the CEE region and the eastern dimension of European energy policy.

The second week widened the lens toward Russia, and the hard questions Europe has been forced to confront about it. Visiting scholar Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen led a sustained inquiry into how Europe got Russia wrong, tracing energy and infrastructure as they shifted from background geopolitics to instruments of leverage, and asking what a genuinely transformative EU strategy toward Russia might look like. Katri Pynnöniemi followed with a bracing examination of war and security in Russian strategy, culminating in a question that no longer feels hypothetical: is Russia at war with Europe? Lenka Martínková, who coordinated the program throughout, brought the Middle East into view and its enduring weight in EU energy security.

The school closed as good schools should — with the students taking the floor. The final day was given over to their own project presentations and a wrap-up discussion, with the Missouri State participants offering a U.S. perspective on energy security to round out the transatlantic exchange. Two weeks of lectures had become a shared conversation across borders and generations of scholars.

For CENTREPEACE, organizing this summer school sits squarely within the project's mission: strengthening research capacity in Central and Eastern Europe and creating spaces where expertise on the region's security can be shared, tested, and passed on. Energy is where geopolitics, economics, and the environment collide most visibly today. Helping the next generation of researchers think clearly about that collision is exactly the kind of work the project exists to support.