About the Academy

Dear friends, as you no doubt know, geopolitics is not a science but a discipline whose purpose is to study interactions between politics and territory, as well as rivalries or tensions that originate or develop within territory.

The discipline had been somewhat neglected in Western democracies after the Second World War because it had been instrumentalised by states seeking to legitimise expansionist ambitions. From the 1960s onward, American and European intellectuals and policymakers, and even Soviet thinkers, restored geopolitics to its natural place within the humanities. In France, Professor Yves Lacoste restored geopolitical analysis to prominence.

The Paris Academy of Geopolitics was created to give this specific way of understanding the balances and imbalances of the contemporary world its full academic and professional dimension. In France, as in many Latin countries, geopolitical study and reflection had long been too neglected by universities.

The creation of the Paris Academy of Geopolitics follows the successes achieved over the past decade through the International Institute for Strategic Studies in organising seminars and conferences, as well as through our Geostrategics journal. We can now address the shortcomings identified in the training of elites. It is a pressing responsibility and a reasonable challenge that we will meet together.