Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer

Dr. Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer is director of the Institute for Strategic Research (IRSEM) at the French Ministry for the Armed Forces, and a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Washington DC. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) and an Honorary Ancien of NATO Defense College.

Trained in three disciplines—philosophy (Bachelor, Master, Ph.D.), law (Bachelor, LL.M., post-doctorate) and in political science (doctorate)—, he served previously as a Policy officer on “Security and Global Affairs” at the Policy Planning Staff (CAPS) of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2013-2016). He also held positions at the Faculty of Law at McGill University in Canada (2011-2013), at the department of War Studies of King’s College in London (2010-2011), at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies of Yale University (2008-2009), at the French Embassy in Turkmenistan (2007-2008) and at the University of Montreal (2005-2007).

Auditor of the 68th national session on “Defense Policy” of the Institute for Higher National Defense Studies (IHEDN), member of the Ethics Committee created by the Minister of the Armed Forces in January 2020, he has received several awards (including the “Maréchal Foch” prize from the Académie française in 2013, and being nominated a Munich Young Leader at the Munich Security Conference in 2018).

The author of some one hundred articles and more than twenty books, he published on international relations theory, collective security (UNSC, veto restraint), military interventionism (Libya, Syria, Ukraine), R2P, law of armed conflict, the humanitarian debate on nuclear weapons (TPNW), remote warfare (targeted killings, armed drones, lethal autonomous weapon systems), international criminal justice (ICC, in particular in its relationship to Africa), hybrid warfare, information manipulation, human rights, totalitarianism, the Horn of Africa (Eritrea) and the mutations of the international order.