Year 2024-2025 / Second Semester
Teaching staff : Paul Zajac and Guillaume Lasconjarias
Format : six two-hour sessions / 3 ECTS.
Dates and times: Mondays, 4-6pm
Presentation of the seminar
The aim of this seminar is to provide students with a basis for understanding and analysing strategy, defined by André Beaufre as ‘the art of the dialectic of wills using force to resolve their conflict’. Since strategy involves bringing together political goals of varying nature and scope and military and non-military means that evolve over time, this course will take account of the diversity of strategies as well as what unites them – uncertainty, complexity and the clash of wills. Rather than recounting the history of strategic thinking or reflecting on the nature of war, the course will constantly move back and forth between the study of theories and concepts of strategy, in particular by drawing on the great names, and their implementation in history up to the present day, through case studies.