Justin Vaisse is James Anderson Professor of American Foreign Policy at SAIS Europe


Justin Vaïsse is James Anderson Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), teaching at the Europe Center in Bologna, and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS in Washington, DC.

From 2019 to 2026, he was Director General of the Paris Peace Forum, an independent non-profit organization he created in 2018 under the impetus of French President Emmanuel Macron to bring solutions to the most pressing global governance challenges of our time. He still serves as President of the Paris Peace Forum Endowment Fund.

Prior to that role, he was Director of Policy Planning at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for more than 6 years. In this role, he advised the Minister and the President on strategic decisions and provided background analysis and forecast on international affairs. From 2007 – 2013, Justin Vaïsse was Director of Research for the Center on the United States and Europe and a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC.

A historian specializing in international relations and American foreign policy, Dr. Vaïsse is the author or co-author of numerous books on the United States, including Neoconservatism – The Biography of a Movement (Harvard University Press, 2010), a book deemed “essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the contours of our recent political past” by the New York Times. His biography of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was published in France in 2016, in the US in 2018 under the title Zbigniew Brzezinski – America’s Grand Strategist (Harvard University Press) and in several other countries.

A graduate student from L'Ecole Normale Supérieure and Sciences Po, he got his Agrégation in history in 1996, his Ph.D. in 2005 and his habilitation in 2011. He was a teaching assistant at Harvard University in 1996-1997 and an adjunct professor at Sciences-Po from 1999-2006 and at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University from 2007-2013.