Maud Quessard

Collaborator
Aug 18
Maud Quessard is Research Director at the Institute for Strategic Research of the French War College (IRSEM), where she has headed the Europe, Transatlantic Space and Russia programme since 2020, and Associate Professor of American foreign policy. She holds a PhD in North American studies from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (2009) and was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Department of History and Belfer Center in 2015. Her work addresses United States public diplomacy and influence strategies, information warfare, and the contemporary transformations of American power. She co-directs the Observatory of American Foreign Policy with Jean-Baptiste Velut, co-leads the ANR STRONG research project on information struggles, and has edited the North America section of the Annuaire français de relations internationales with Frédérick Gagnon and subsequently Justin Massie.

She has taught American foreign policy since 2005 at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, the University of Poitiers, Sciences Po Paris and its Americas campus, and Paris 2-Panthéon-Assas, and lectures regularly at the French War College and other institutions of professional military education. She is the author of Stratégies d’influence et guerres de l’information (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2019) and La Puissance sans principe. Le nouvel empire américain (Seuil, October 2026), and co-editor of Alliances and Power Politics in the Trump Era. America in Retreat? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Les Guerres de l’information à l’ère numérique (PUF, 2021). Her articles include « How the West Was One: France, America, and the “Huntingtonian Reversal” », co-authored with David Haglund in Orbis. Journal of World Affairs (2018), and she co-edited the 2026 special issue of Politique américaine

Expertise

  • American Soft Power
  • United States Foreign Policy
  • Information Wars

Selected Publications

Network Publications

Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) The Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces / Le Ministère de la Défense nationale et les Forces armées canadiennes