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Olivier Roy

  • Position research director at CNRS
  • Biography

    Olivier Roy is Research Director at the CNRS and Associate Director of Studies at EHESS. He holds France’s highest teaching diploma in philosophy and has taught that same subject. He graduated in 1972 from the National Institute on Oriental Languages and Civilizations, where he studied Persian.  In 1981 he began to study the Afghan war; from that experience he published “Afghanistan, Islam et modernité politique” (“Afghanistan, Islam and Political Modernity”) in 1985. That same year, he joined the Political Science section at CNRS, where he studied Islamist political movements. He served as Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe Special Representative to Tajikistan between August 1993 and November 1994. Since the start of the 2009 academic year, he has been lecturing at the European University Institute in Florence, where he runs the Mediterranean Programme.