About the Academy

Dear friends, geopolitics is not a science in the strict sense but a discipline that studies interactions between politics and territory, rivalries and tensions that arise or develop within a territorial framework.

This discipline was long neglected in Western democracies after the Second World War, partly because it had been misused by states seeking to legitimise expansionist ambitions. From the 1960s onward, American and European intellectuals and policymakers restored geopolitics to its rightful place within the humanities. In France, Professor Yves Lacoste played a decisive role in renewing geopolitical analysis.

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.