Crises follow one another, experts proliferate, academic programmes multiply. And companies are beginning to realise that they can no longer ignore a world they thought they could keep at arm’s length. International relations and security and defence have become a “market”. But a market for whom? And to what end?
In the more than twenty-five years I have spent supporting business leaders, I have rarely met economic decision-makers who were genuinely aware of international relations issues in their security and defence dimensions.
For most of them, the world was an open playground – to be discovered, conquered, and used to cut costs, whether on supplies or services. Globalisation was a happy one, we were told. And in that context, the question of preserving skills and production capacity, particularly in industry, was not raised often enough.
I treasure the memory of one executive who courageously chose to leave a prestigious position rather than accept, as his group’s leadership wished, a contract with leonine terms: in exchange for short-term orders, he would have guaranteed the (Asian) buyer control of his company’s key skills over the medium and long term.
But he was the exception. Around him, few of his peers really asked themselves these questions. Security issues? Barely mentioned. Those of “global defence”, in its economic, technological and political dimensions? Almost absent from conversations.
Over those same years, I had also come to know and meet, one way or another, almost all the think tanks active on these subjects and their experts. The “market” was in fact very small. It was quite easy to take part in exchanges between motivated representatives of “civil society” and the few specialists in diplomatic or military affairs.
All of this has changed in recent years. And in these changes, I see both positive dynamics and worrying developments.
The proliferation of programmes: good news, with perverse effects
During my student years and until the mid-1990s, the programmes dedicated to international relations and security and defence in France could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Paris-Panthéon-Assas, Lyon 3, ILERI in the private sector – with small intakes. Sciences Po Paris too, of course. And Sciences Po Grenoble, though these subjects were not, in principle, a specialisation there. They were more like options grafted onto degrees in law, history or political science.
For those who wanted to learn without making it their profession, there were other routes: for example, the open activities of think tanks and associations, or joining the military reserve. That is how, as an officer and then a senior officer over the years, I was able to benefit from high-level training on these subjects, including alongside comrades from the regular army. And then there were the sessions of the IHEDN, France’s Institute for Higher National Defence Studies – national sessions for a happy few, and regional ones to raise awareness of these issues more widely among economic decision-makers.
In the early 2000s, the “market” for security and defence training grew. First, the 9/11 effect: the brutal reminder that our world is never truly at peace. Then the LMD reform, which aligned French degrees with the European bachelor–master–doctorate model and seems to have encouraged the creation of specialised programmes where previously only a dissertation or thesis topic could show a specialisation. But the cohorts of graduates remained limited.
Today, there is an abundance. There are between forty and sixty specialised programmes in international relations and security and defence, at all levels. Every year they send several thousand graduates onto the job market, several hundred of them with specialisations that are hard to transfer to the business world. This is probably, like the surge of volunteers for the armed forces, both regular and reserve, an effect of the 2015 terrorist attacks in France, which made people realise that peace and freedom are fragile.
It is also a necessity and an opportunity for a field that was neglected for far too long. But the real effects – notably the building of a pool of solid experts – will only be fully felt in a few years’ time. It takes ten to twenty years to acquire real legitimacy in these highly specialised fields, and it is good to see that institutions are now encouraging investment in academic research on security and defence. It is never too late…
But today’s specialists are those who began their studies in the 2000s, who are now in their forties, and whose scarcity becomes apparent with every new crisis. We saw this, for example, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, when genuine experts (women included, I would stress) were particularly rare, and therefore in extremely high demand.
But this profusion of programmes is also already producing negative effects. Internship offers in the institutions concerned are multiplying, without necessarily leading to permanent jobs. Too many young graduates come up against a shortage of openings. And those who resign themselves to approaching sectors further removed from their original career plans struggle to make the most of skills that are too specialised to be transferred.
They thought they had found the golden goose. Many are discovering fool’s gold.
The rush for expertise: between legitimate specialists and opportunists
In this context of growing demand, not everyone loses out – at least not immediately.
The 24-hour news channels need to be fed. With recognisable faces and confident, even divisive – “polarising”, as they say – opinions. And when the few genuine experts are overwhelmed with requests, or when they honestly judge that their expertise is not the most relevant for the topic of the moment, other profiles rush into the gap. With aplomb, a certain rhetorical ease, and a lack of scruples that can fascinate as much as it ought, normally, to worry. For some, media fame has become an asset in its own right, independent of any proven competence.
The academic programmes that continue to develop also attract speakers of varying quality. Among them, fortunately, are academics whose training and intellectual rigour allow them to broaden their original field without sacrificing the quality of what they bring. These profiles are precious, because they ensure serious teaching continuity amid this abundance of programmes. But in these same programmes there are also speakers more attracted by fame or financial rewards than by teaching, who impose themselves with more conviction than proven competence. Speakers whom programme directors accept, often for want of anyone better or through a lack of discernment – but because, after all, students have to be attracted.
Curiously, few recognised experts come from the diplomatic world. Is this, with a few well-known exceptions, due to a natural reserve acquired over a career that teaches discretion? Or to a professional status that encourages such reserve? It is a pity in any case, because the diplomatic approach has its own specificity, its own way of reading crises – different from that of the military officer or the academic, and complementary to them.
On the other hand, there are many former military officers who have reinvented themselves in this role of public expert. Their presence is partly explained by a very specific structural reality: career management for senior officers and generals could not guarantee them all a move into defence companies, especially in recent years, which have been difficult for that sector. With the reduction in the number of units, and therefore of their commanders, many high-ranking officers were pushed out of the institution while they were still fully willing – and some, for personal and family reasons, obliged – to start a “second career” quickly.
Among them, the genuine experts – those who have really worked on strategic, geopolitical and operational issues – are in fact rare. As rare as their public statements. Others, less scrupulous about the gap between their actual experience and the claims they make, know how to cleverly drape themselves in the prestige of the institution, of their predecessors and of the most deserving of their contemporaries. Presented, at least implicitly, as experienced warriors and high-flying strategists, they have often mainly been peacetime administrators. Useful cogs, certainly, but executives of a large bureaucracy that has little to teach a world in search of agility, innovation and rapid decision-making in uncertain environments.
The proliferation of programmes is an additional opportunity for some of them, particularly outside the university world, which is strictly bound by precise qualification criteria. As is the creation of new “think tanks” whose status and funding are often opaque, which multiply public statements without anyone really being able to assess the seriousness of their expertise. These organisations seek in particular to enhance their shop window with “2S” generals – generals placed in the “deuxième section” – a term most recruiters and journalists do not even fully understand. (As a reminder: in theory, these general officers in the second section could be recalled to command in the event of war. Which may legitimately be a cause for concern, given some of the profiles appearing on television today…)
Companies: a new clientele, or a mobilisation challenge?
In theory, companies are a natural outlet for all these people trained in the challenges of a changing world. Not only in the arms or security sectors. Not only because conflicts are increasingly hybrid and technologies increasingly dual-use. But because all these dimensions must now be built into the strategic management of any organisation with an international dimension – in its supply chains, its markets, its partners.
But do they need the specialists already on the market, and those produced by today’s programmes?
When programmes were still “generalist with individual specialisation”, highly specialised profiles found work – in academic institutions and in think tanks, which are more numerous elsewhere than in France. And broader profiles could put their knowledge of international issues to good use as one asset among others, in the service of wider skills: risk management, international commercial negotiation, strategic intelligence. That little something extra.
The growing specialisation that now accompanies the proliferation of programmes has become a real obstacle to employment. Crises and geographical tensions are multiplying, it is true. But no company, apart from the dedicated institutions and think tanks, can permanently employ a specialist for each country or each area of tension. Highly specialised new graduates arrive on a narrow, quickly saturated market, with skills whose transfer to organisations remains difficult to make the most of.
They thought it was the golden goose, when it is more probably fool’s gold.
The “warriors”: fascinating, but rarely transferable
There is another type of profile that is finding growing resonance in companies: veterans of special forces – real warriors – and, more recently, a few former intelligence officers who openly claim and promote that past, in contrast with the tradition of discretion of their predecessors. The effect of TV series such as Le Bureau des Légendes (The Bureau) or Cœurs noirs? Or simply the extension of the cult of the ego to every part of society?
These profiles fascinate. Their stories make people dream. The team-building events they run are often unforgettable.
But their capacity to inspire – and above all to genuinely transfer skills – is extremely limited. The work of Olivier Schmitt shows this clearly: wartime military organisations and civilian organisations are radically different in nature, culture and decision-making mechanisms. Peacetime structures can be compared (including defence and security organisations). Wartime structures cannot be transposed.
Because the crises that companies and civilian organisations go through, even the most violent ones, have nothing in common with war except the name some people give them a little too quickly. Unless a company literally finds itself under fire – in which case it is no longer a matter of producing, but of surviving.
What our companies really need
In these troubled times, international relations and security and defence issues therefore look like a new El Dorado. The major consulting firms, which have appeared quite recently in the spaces devoted to strategic debate, now offer dedicated expertise – or rather their usual teams, flanked by one or two “big names” whose job is more to open doors than to genuinely enrich the services provided. And the self-appointed experts mentioned above thrive on a widespread lack of knowledge of the fundamentals, amid a sense of urgency that is now widely felt.
For genuine experts, the period is probably favourable – and that is a good thing, because for too long they worked without real recognition of their added value. But these benefits are structurally limited: maintaining a high level of expertise requires continuous time for monitoring, reading and exchanges – time that cannot be monetised without being sacrificed.
Yet companies urgently need to make progress on these subjects. For several reasons that are no longer a matter of intellectual debate, but of the concrete reality of running an organisation.
It is no longer possible to invest anywhere and with anyone without asking the right questions – something some should have had in mind long before the current crises forced them to. Every company has a moral and legal responsibility for the safety of its employees, its partners and their families, whether in areas of geopolitical tension or in the face of new forms of hybrid threats, be they physical, technological or cognitive. Our collective future and the preservation of our freedoms also depend on the strength and durability of our companies, which are political actors (in the sense of actors in the life of the city) as much as economic ones. And international relations should now be part of the general knowledge essential to any decision-maker in an interconnected, competitive world where the rules of the game are changing at unprecedented speed.
These needs are real. And to meet them effectively, companies need two very different – and complementary – types of profile.
First, recognised specialists – to provide in-depth, rigorous expertise based on years of serious work. To genuinely inform strategic decisions. Experts who need to be identified beyond the high-profile media figures, whose availability is often limited and whose up-to-date expertise is, as we have said, sometimes questionable.
But also, and perhaps above all, translators. Because when two worlds are too far apart, the lessons of one cannot be fully transposed to the other. The most brilliant specialist, if they do not speak the language of business, will not be understood – or worse, will be misunderstood. The “culture shock” is too great to bring about real ownership and change. It can fascinate, sometimes. It paralyses, often.
These translators are by nature “marginal secants” (marginaux sécants) – a sociological concept describing individuals who belong to several groups at once, able to move between and connect worlds that, without them, would not talk to each other. Women and men with a foot in both worlds. Who speak both languages. Who have that little something extra that enables and enriches exchanges between experts sometimes shut away in their own world, and decision-makers and managers who are reluctant to open up to these additional constraints, or overwhelmed when it comes to integrating them.
These “translators” are not “new specialists”, like the “chief geopolitical officers” some are calling for. Creating this function with that title, as some did with “chief digital officers” at the start of the wave of “digital transformations”, means running the risk of isolating this competence when it needs to be shared by as many people as possible. Unless the aim is to make an impression (but is that a virtue?), to give a brief impetus and then disappear as quickly as possible, as was the case with CDOs.
They may be former military officers. But of the kind who have also knocked about in the genuinely civilian world, and not only in the defence industrial and technological base, which keeps its members in a closed circle that can be misleading as to their understanding of business dynamics. Such profiles are rare. But they exist (I know at least one), and their value is real.
They are also those former students of programmes that were “both generalist and specialised”, who acquired solid foundations and kept them up through curiosity and practice over the years, while developing other skills – management, negotiation, complex project management – that are directly useful in organisations.
Tomorrow, they will also be those who have resisted the temptation of overly narrow specialisation, which stifles both curiosity and employability. Those who have understood that the value of a profile in a company or a large organisation is not measured by the depth of a niche, but by the ability to connect worlds.
And finally, they are those who, through their unusual career paths and personal commitment, have cultivated knowledge and practice of both worlds, and of the people in them. Those who can make the right connections, beyond labels and titles, by building bridges of understanding between cultures that, without them, would look at each other from afar without ever really talking. “Go-betweens” who do not seek to impress, but to mobilise and move things forward.
These “translators”, these “marginal secants”, do not make magazine covers. They do not fill television studios. But they too are the ones who will enable our companies and their leaders to move forward in a world that neither the warriors nor the television experts can, on their own, help them understand and take in hand.
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