Florian VIDAL
Associate Fellow, Russia / Eurasia 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 Research Fellow at Ifri's Russia / Eurasia Center. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Paris Descartes University and is a researcher at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. He specializes in the resources-energy-technology nexus considering the Anthropocene, including mining issues in remote areas (polar areas, seabeds, and outer space).
In addition, he is an Associate Research Fellow with the Laboratory on Interdisciplinary Studies on Energy (LIED, French National Center for Scientific Research) at the Paris Cité University and a member of the ANR Strategic Metals research project coordinated by the French Geological Survey (BRGM). He also teaches at the Military Academy of Saint-Cyr. Florian Vidal has extensive field experience in Northern Europe, Russia, and Latin America.
In addition to being a leading gas and oil power, Russia also possesses vast geological resources that place it among the world’s leading mining countries.
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.