EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium

The EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium is a network of six independent European think tanks supporting the non-proliferation and disarmament policies of the European Union and leading a network of over 100 European think tanks working on arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament.

The Consortium was established in August 2010 by four institutes, specialising in arms control and disarmament issues: the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS, London), the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique (FRS, Paris), the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. The Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation (VCDNP) and the International Affairs Institute in Rome (IAI) were included in the consortium by Council Decision of 26 February 2018.

The European Council funded the consortium with a total of 2.2 million Euro between 2011 and 2014. For the period 2014 to 2017, the EU increased its grants to a total of 3.6 million Euro. The period 2018 to 2021 received 4.5 million Euro in funding from the European Council. In the current period 2022 to 2025, the funding amounts to approximately 6 million euros.

One of the consortium’s primary tasks is to establish a European network of experts on the issues of non-proliferation and disarmament which are meant to promote both dialog on security policies among political decision-makers and research on European security and peace.

The website of the EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium is a forum for European contributions to the non-proliferation and disarmament debate. In addition, the Consortium regularly publishes policy papers on arms control issues of conventional and unconventional weapons and organises the annual EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Conference.

In this context, PRIF coordinates the European competence building in the field of non-proliferation and disarmament within the 4th term of the project. It supervises the internship programme, in the framework of which a total of 30 interns can carry out a financially supported internship at European think tanks.

In addition, PRIF's task was and is to develop and maintain the free and open-access "EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament eLearning Course", which went online in March 2017 (www.nonproliferation-elearning.eu). In currently 20 learning units, the course spans an arc from introduction to the theory of arms control to weapons of mass destruction, conventional weapons, humanitarian arms control and new technologies. 30 proven international experts, four of them from PRIF, teach the course with 195 short videos, thematic pages, animations and interactive elements. The platform offers the opportunity to acquire online certificates. With over 300 worldwide visits per month, the course is well established. For the new project phase an extension is pending.

In 2011 and 2012, PRIF was also entrusted with the organisation of two EU seminars to discuss the prospects for a mass destruction-free zone in the Middle East. The seminar took place in Brussels with strong regional participation of high-level delegations.

The project partners are the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS, London), the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique (FRS, Paris), the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, the International Affairs Institute in Rome, and the European Union (pursuant to Council Decision CD 2018/299/CFSP).

• Project manager: Christopher Daase
• Project coordinator: Niklas Schörnig
• Further employees: Max Köhler (technical implementation)  

The implementation of the eLearning platform was kindly supported by Studium Digitale from Frankfurt University.