PCMR team
Filip Sommer
DIRECTOR
Filip Sommer is the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Relations at the CEVRO University in Prague. He holds a master’s degree in Regional and Political Geography from the Department of Social Geography and Regional Development at the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague. He is currently completing a doctoral program in Regional and Political Geography at the same institution. His research focuses on Kurdish politics, as well as the security, economic, and political landscape, particularly in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the broader Middle East. He also concentrates on non-state armed actors, their motivations, geographical differentiation, and their impact on the functioning of state institutions.
His dissertation thesis aims to present the mechanisms of governance among the various key actors in Iraq’s disputed territories and their perceptions by the local population. Filip has been conducting fieldwork in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Federal Iraq for the past 5 years, first collecting data for his master’s thesis on the geopolitical position of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), and now conducting field research in Iraq’s disputed territories.
Filip is then currently a lecturer at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS), focusing on political geography and contemporary conflict areas of the world. He also works as a faculty advisor for the Model United Nations (MUN) there. Finally, he is a research fellow at the Institute of Regional and International Studies (IRIS) at AUIS, where he focuses on political, economic, and security issues in the Kurdish and Iraqi political landscape.
Research Focus:
- Armed conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the wider Middle East
- The Kurdish issue
- Non-state armed actors in the Middle East
- Geopolitical relations in the Middle East
- Conflict areas in North and Sub-Saharan Africa
Lenka Klicperová
RESEARCH FELLOW
Lenka Klicperová is a journalist and a photographer. She obtained her master’s degree at the University of Hradec Králové. Right after graduating she started working as a journalist. From 2004 to 2018, she was the editor-in-chief of the magazine Lidé a Země. She has been working as a freelance reporter and photographer since 2018. She has worked in a number of African countries, from Angola to Namibia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She visited Afghanistan several times, as well as Somalia, plagued by several decades of war. Since 2014, she has focused on the issue of war with the ISIS. She is the co-author of several documentaries (Tears of the Congo, Latim – Circumcised, Iraqi, Women in the Taliban, Unbroken) and a number of television reports. She has won eleven prizes and nominations in the Czech Press Photo competition – both for photography and for video production. In 2020, she was included in the prestigious Women Photograph database, which includes the best photographers from around the world. In 2010, the first book Africa within Us was published, on which she collaborated with Olga and Václav Šilha. The book was freely followed by Africa within Us II. Her work in Syria resulted in two books entitled In Sight of the Islamic State I and In Sight of the Islamic State II, both co-authored by Markéta Kutilová.
Together with Kutilová, she also wrote other books on the issues of war in Syria and Iraq: In the War (2018) and War is My Fate (2020). In 2019, a book called AK47 was published, which depicts dramatic life of the world-famous Czech war photographer Antonín Kratochvíl. Klicperová wrote the text of the book based on Kratochvíl’s narration. In September 2020, war broke out in Nagorno-Karabakh. Lenka Klicperová and Markéta Kutilová quickly moved to the center of events. The war in the Caucasus was captured by both reporters in many reports, but also in the book The Last One Sets the Village on Fire (2021).
Klicperová cooperates with a number of Czech media. She also lectures at the Department of Political Science at the University of Hradec Králové.
Research Focus:
- Armed conflicts in the Middle East and the Caucasus
- Armed conflicts in Africa
- The Kurdish issue
- ISIS, its rise, development and future
Vojtěch Bílý
RESEARCH FELLOW
Vojtěch Bílý is a researcher at the Prague Centre for Middle East Relations at the CEVRO University. He attended the Lycée Carnot in Dijon, France, later he studied psychology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, where he obtained his M.A. degree. From September 2013 to June 2014, he worked as a volunteer-teacher in the Central African Republic (CAR), where he also became a witness to the unfolding civil war. During the turmoil, he participated in crisis negotiations and humanitarian interventions; he was cooperating with the world’s media, which reported on the events of the civil war in CAR. He co-authored the book “When Mangoes Fall” in which he captures his experience of the war in the CAR. For several years he was involved with a non-profit organization SIRIRI; in 2016 he was appointed as a director of the organization. He is also active in international trade.
Research Focus:
- Armed conflicts in Africa
- Humanitarian aid and development cooperation
- Euro-African relations
- Inter-ethnical / inter-religious coexistence in Africa
Richard Klauber
RESEARCH INTERN
Richard Klauber has been a research intern at the Prague Center for Middle East Relations (PCMR) of CEVRO University for a long time. He is a student of a Bachelor’s program in Political Science and International Relations at CEVRO University. His bachelor thesis “Separatism of Karakalpakstan: A Future Russian Aggression?” was defended in February 2025. He completed a journalism internship at the News and Analysis Department of the Czech Television.
In the framework of PCMR, he is mainly engaged in writing thematic policy papers, such as “The Decline of the Iranian Regime” (which deals with the gradual weakening of the Iranian regime from a domestic and geopolitical perspective) or “Terrorism and Activism of the Baloch Ethnic Group” (which describes the efforts of the Baloch ethnic group to resist the Iranian and Pakistani governments in order to assert their rights and freedoms). Richard is currently working on an analysis of the Sudanese civil war, which is largely neglected (not only in the media) in the context of other conflicts around the world (such as the war in Ukraine and the Gaza war).
In particular, Richard helps to organise closed roundtables within PCMR.
Research interests:
- Elections in Africa
- Armed conflicts in Africa
- Ethnic and religious conflicts in Africa and the Middle East
- Totalitarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa
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