Sonja Amadae

S.M. Amadae is a tenured political scientist at the University of Helsinki, with a research focus on nuclear war and security, climate change and collective action, and AI’s impact on human’s ability to govern catastrophic risks. She joined CSER as Director in March 2025 from the University of Helsinki. 

Amadae is completing a book on the theme of computational tyranny: the increasing envelopment of human communications and social relations in digital media. She previously published the books Prisoners of Reason, and the award-winning Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy. She has held professorships at the Central European University, Ohio State University and Swansea University, visiting appointments at the London School of Economics, New School University, and Harvard University, and maintains a research affiliate position with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  In 2020, she was a Berggruen Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Centre for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral and Social Sciences.  Amadae has published in the scientific journals American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, Journal of Economic Methodology, and Annual Review of Political Science, and also has developed an online computer simulation for how patterns of systemic discrimination can arise.

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Finland’s accession into NATO in 2023, risks of conflict escalation into nuclear war once again dominated headlines.  Amadae served as Co-PI of the NATO poll project called Dynamic Democratic Support of Finnish Defense Policy. This public opinion research tracks citizens’ engagement with and support of security and defense policies.  She commented on the implications of Sweden and Finland’s NATO accession for the future of nuclear arms in the Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum. She co-authored Autonomy and machine learning at the interface of nuclear weapons, computers and people for SIPRI’s volume on the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Strategic Stability and Nuclear Risk with CSER’s senior research associate Shahar Avin.     

In 2021, Amadae served as Co-PI of a 2.75 M EUR Horizon 2020 grant for research and innovation hosted at Aalto University called Accounting Technologies for Anti-Rival Coordination and Allocation (ATARCA).  This project addressed the limitations of contemporary monetary systems that only recognize rival and scarce sources of value, thus ignoring the network effects characterizing collective security and the minimization of environmental harms.  For ATARCA, Amadae led the Food Futures project dedicated to ameliorating the collective action problem characterizing the global tragedy of the atmospheric commons.  The team developed an innovative Web 3.0 solution applying a community cryptocurrency to track the positive externalities of sustainable consumer choices.  They also generated open-source content which is now part of Finland’s Climate University to achieve wide impact.

Starting in 2021 Amadae has been serving as the director of the Global Political and Communication (GPC) international MA programme.  This interdisciplinary degree curriculum covers the fields of global political economy, organizations and governance, and media and democracy.  Under Amadae’s directorship, the programme hosted events with Finland’s former president Tarja Halonen, and current Finnish EU parliamentary members Pekka Toveri and Maria Ohisala.  GPC also won a US Embassy grant to host a student exchange between the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Global Public Affairs program and the University of Helsinki.  These events interrogated themes of effective preparedness for unexpected catastrophic events and of social forces leading to the deconsolidation of democracy.