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Dr. Justin Vaïsse

Founder and Director General of Paris Peace Forum and Former Director General of Policy Planning Department of French Foreign Ministry
Justin Vaïsse is the Founder and Director General of the Paris Peace Forum, an independent non-profit. organization he created in 2018 under the impetus of French President Emmanuel Macron. The Paris Peace. Forum is an annual event that aims at reinforcing multilateralism and promoting new rules and solutions to address the global challenges of our time. The inaugural edition convened 75 heads of state and international organizations as well as 6 000 participants from the private
sector, NGOs, foundations and civil society at large. The following editions, gathering world leaders and citizens from around the world, happen every year on Nov. 11-13.

Prior to that role, Justin Vaïsse was Director of Policy Planning at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for more than 6 years. In this role, he advised the Minister on his strategic decisions and provided background analysis and forecast on international affairs.

From 2007 – 2013, Justin Vaïsse was Director of Research for the Center on the United States and Europe and a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he initiated several projects, including the Brookings Eurozone Survey and the European Foreign Policy Scorecard with the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) – an annual evaluation of Europe’s performance on the world stage.

A historian specializing in international relations and American foreign policy, Dr. Vaïsse is the author or co-author of numerous books on the United States, including Neoconservatism – The Biography of a Movement (Harvard University Press, 2010), a book deemed “essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the contours of our recent political past” by the New York Times. His biography of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was published in France in 2016, in the US in 2018 under the title Zbigniew Brzezinski – America’s Grand Strategist (Harvard University Press) and in several other countries.

A graduate student from L'Ecole Normale Supérieure and Sciences Po, he got his Agrégation in history in 1996, his Ph.D. in 2005 and his habilitation in 2011. He was a teaching assistant at Harvard University in 1996-1997 and an adjunct professor at Sciences-Po from 1999-2006 and at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University from 2007-2013.