François Foret

François Foret serves as Professor of political science at the Free University of Brussels, where he concurrently holds the presidency of the Institute for European Studies (IEE) since September 2023 and conducts research at Cevipol. He maintains an additional affiliation as a fellow at the European Governance and Politics Programme, Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute in Florence.

His scholarly work centers on political sociology, European studies, and comparative politics, with deep investigation into the legitimization of political orders and symbolic politics. He examines the intricate interplay between politics, culture, religion, and values through comparative analysis of Europe, Japan, and the United States. Current research tracks the proliferation and rapid exhaustion of political narratives in community-building processes, analyzing how identity, normative, and memory issues transform into new cultural forms that interact with institutional justification. He also explores the dynamic relationship between arts—particularly theater and literature—and political systems.

Recent publications reveal consistent thematic threads across his work, including cross-cultural value systems in European and Japanese contexts, the European Union's strategic deployment of symbolic distinctions for governance and competitiveness, and the secular-religious dynamics within EU political frameworks. These outputs demonstrate an interdisciplinary methodology bridging political science with cultural studies, emphasizing narrative construction and symbolic power in institutional legitimacy.

No scientific awards were documented in the provided source material.

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Professor Foret's primary research infrastructure includes the Centre for Political Science Research (Cevipol) and the Institute for European Studies (IEE) at the Free University of Brussels, which provide essential frameworks for his comparative political analysis and European integration studies.