A member of the FEDE’s Academic Council, Francois Bernard Huyghe is also Director of Research at IRIS (French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs) and President of OSI (Observatoire stratégique de l’information), formerly known as the Observatoire géostratégique de l’information, which analyses how information influences countries socially and politically. He will be taking part in this year’s annual Influence Day on 22 April. The event, which is dedicated to media intelligence, corporate communications and influence communication, is organised by the French Ecole de guerre and will take place at 196 rue de Grenelle in Paris’s seventh arrondissement. The focus will be on rethinking global communication and influence strategies: why should they be rethought, how should we do so, and who should be involved? The event brings together a number of [lire plus]

Patrick Vieu: ‘We should build rather than undergo globalisation’ A graduate of the ENA ("Léon Gambetta" class of 1991-1993) and Sciences Po Paris, Patrick Vieu also has a PhD in philosophy. Among his various posts, from 2012-2014 he was the French President’s Advisor on the Environment and the Regions, focusing on transport and sustainable development. A member of the FEDE’s Academic Council, in this interview he shares his views on globalisation. ‘We should build rather than undergo globalisation’… Nice phrasing, but what does it mean?  We can manage the demographic, environmental and migration-related challenges of globalisation if we are able to produce, collectively, a representation of the world that the majority of people can approve. Rather than a globalisation based on forced interdependencies, we need a globalisation based on active [lire plus]

Michel Maffesoli : ‘Today’s modern democratic ideal has expired’ Michel Maffesoli, honorary professor at the Sorbonne and a founding member of the FEDE’s Academic Council, is a leading figure in European intellectual circles. While his analyses tend to stir up and unsettle his audience, hey are always full of sense. Read on to find out his views on the recent French municipal elections. What’s your reaction to the results of the recent elections? What’s striking is not so much the rise of the greens (a few groups of would-be green, power-starved yuppies have capitalised on the trend for green) but rather the tremendous lack of interest for the local elections amongst ordinary people. Nobody – be it the traditional parties, the pseudo-new forms of representation (the ‘neither left-wingers nor right-wingers’ of [lire plus]