Does there exist a French geopolitics? | The Great Continent

In the complex history of French receptions and practices of geopolitics, the creation in 2026 of a Geopolitical Institute of Advanced Studies at the École normale supérieure constitutes an important milestone. It confirms the recognition from which this discipline, long disdained or viewed with suspicion, now benefits in France.

Above all, it testifies to the topicality and relevance of the geopolitical approach, at a time when the international order set up at the end of the Cold War is disintegrating, leaving the world scene to fragment into competing blocs and spheres of influence prey to the logic of ideological and technological confrontation.

Anchored within the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Geopolitical Institute for Advanced Studies aims to constitute a place for the production and dissemination of rigorous and effective knowledge in the service of the city. Working to develop a new geopolitics capable of confronting the unprecedented challenges of the moment in which it is born, it does not intend to make a clean sweep of the past. This is why he is devoting his inaugural conference to establishing a broad historical and critical inventory of geopolitics in France.

The conference will firstly look at the history of French receptions and uses of geopolitics. This return to the history of the discipline will be an opportunity to question the relationships, explicit or not, that some key figures in the human and social sciences have had with it, whether geographers, historians, philosophers, political scientists or even anthropologists. Particular attention will also be paid to the actors, whether diplomats, political decision-makers or even major international institutions based in France, who have contributed through their practices to concretely forging a French-style geopolitics.

Although it focuses on a national geopolitical tradition, the conference will give pride of place to other scales. In France as elsewhere, geopolitical knowledge and practices have in fact been at the heart of international circulations which it will be important to examine. We will thus question the links of French geopolitics with other national geopolitical traditions, placing particular emphasis on the way in which it has been received, adopted, adapted or criticized abroad.

In line with the geopolitics open to interdisciplinarity which the new Institute aims to promote, the conference will be an opportunity to give ample space to dialogue with researchers from many related disciplinary fields.

By crossing views, analytical angles and issues, the conference will seek in fine to determine whether there exists or existed one (or more) coherent French geopolitics, distinguishing itself from those produced and practiced elsewhere in the world. And to think about ways to continue and reinvent this tradition.