Florian VIDAL
Associate Fellow, Russia/NIS Center
Research Interests:
- Regional dynamics in the Arctic (Northern Europe and Russia)
- Mining strategies and energy transition
- Political ecology and Anthropocene
Florian Vidal is an Associate Fellow at Ifri's Russia/NIS Center. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Paris Descartes University where research focused on Norway-Russia relations in the Arctic. His current research interests involve environmental issues, including mining stakes in remote areas.
Florian Vidal has extensive field experience in Northern Europe, Russia and Latin America. He is also an Associate Research Fellow at the Paris Interdisciplinary Energy Research Institute (University of Paris) and is involved in several scientific projects (APECS, Earth System Governance project, Extractive Industries Network, American Ecological Transitions at IHEAL-CREDA). He holds a Master's degree in Contemporary History from the University of Toulouse and a Master’s degree in International Affairs from Sciences Po Bordeaux.
With the advent of New Space, Russia is engaged in a race against time to preserve one of its major industrial assets.
Latin American governments have not responded consistently to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since 1969, the return of a human mission to the Moon has never seemed so close. Although scientific interest continued to flourish, space programmes had for many decades abandoned it in favour of the International Space Station and missions to explore the solar system.
GLONASS, Moscow’s answer to GPS, is set to launch an upgraded satellite network later this year, which it hopes to sell to the U.S. and Europe. Buyer beware.
The series For All Mankind (2019) is a fictional alternate history that imagines a world where the Soviet Union was the first power to send an astronaut to the moon. From that starting point, the two rival superpowers compete to establish their own lunar station.