Thomas Flichy de La Neuville is a Research Professor at IWP. He is currently serving as the Chair of Geopolitics at the Rennes School of Business. Full bio

Desperate Offensives on the Horizon
Above: The Battle of Gaugamela, by Jan Brueghel the Elder Before collapsing, declining empires often give themselves a respite in the form of a Saint Martin’s summer. This quiet period is usually followed by a desperate offensive. This movement will bring about a brutal collapse if it fails, but if by chance it succeeds, then…
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The Public Health Crisis as a Disruptive Creative Force
An Analysis by the Rennes School of Business Research Lab With the help of France’s most internationally diverse management team, the Rennes School of Business Research Lab has spent the last few months focusing on the impact of the current public health crisis. Through their analysis of 24 contemporary studies, 49 academics are shedding unique…
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Righting the Economy after an Epidemic: Lessons from History
Do previous epidemics help us to prepare for the future? These various historical incidents are highly instructive when we consider the key difference between, for example, the Plague which struck in the mid-14th century or cholera outbreak of the 19th century and COVID-19. What makes the latter distinct is that, despite intensive media reporting, mortality…
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Janus-Faced Diplomacies
Thomas Flichy de La Neuville is a Research Professor at IWP and a Doctor of Research (with French Agrégation qualification) in History and Geopolitics Chair at the Rennes School of Business. The art of diplomacy is founded on ambiguity.[1] Foreign policy is rarely enacted singlehandedly. Duets are infinitely more effective. As such, an official representative…
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What Resources Can We Use to Establish Our Vision of the World?
There are two key resources we can use: reading and travel. We still need to be able to distinguish those few books which truly speak to us from the masses which do not. A university’s heart is therefore its library. If it were to be emptied or neglected, this would indicate that something had gone…
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When Paul Valéry Imagined Hacking the Human Brain
In his interwar work Les regards sur le monde actuel (1962), Paul Valéry intuits that civilization would one day enter a new era following the triumph of technology over contemplation. For Valéry (who worked as a clerk in the French War Ministry), an intelligence-disrupting regime had already been established by fraudulent intellectuals who disconnected thought…
Read More from When Paul Valéry Imagined Hacking the Human Brain ›A Cooling Climate & a Breakaway from Nature: How Gabriel Tarde imagined the modern world in 1896
In 1896, a magistrate from the Perigord region of France, Gabriel Tarde, tried to imagine how the planet would evolve in the 21st century. His work Fragment d’histoire future depicts humanity after a climate catastrophe in which the sun has shown clear signs of fading, causing global temperatures to fall. Yet the scientific world appears…
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Digitalizing the World: The Era of Invisible Power
Thomas Flichy de La Neuville is an IWP Research Professor and the Chair of Geopolitics at the Rennes School of Business. It is clear that digitalizing the world, which interconnects people and equipment, represents a major transition within our civilization. It is changing the ways in which power is exercised, partly concealing it from public…
Read More from Digitalizing the World: The Era of Invisible Power ›The Persian Gulf: Transitioning towards an increasingly complex interplay of geopolitical influences
Thomas Flichy de La Neuville is a Research Professor at IWP and History Research Director (with French Agrégation qualification) and Professor of International Relations at the Rennes School of Business. As of July 2017, there was on average just one American carrier strike group[1] or amphibious ready group[2] in the Persian Gulf.[3] However, since mid-May…
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Insignificant Research into Trifling Details: René Guénon on the Failure of Universities
Thomas Flichy de La Neuville is a Research Professor at IWP and History Research Director (with French Agrégation qualification) and Professor of International Relations at the Rennes School of Business. When René Guénon published Orient et Occident (East and West) in 1924, the industrialization of knowledge had already been inflicted upon the university machine for…
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