More than 200 people took part in the seminar PRIO and the French Cultural Centre organized with the French political scientist and expert of Islam Olivier Roy.
The seminar was held in French, with simultaneous translation into Norwegian.
Olivier Roy is a political scientist and scholar of Persian language and civilisation. He has been professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) in Paris since 2003) and senior researcher in political science at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) since 1985. He was consultant to UNOCA (United Nations Office of the Coordinator for Afghanistan) in 1988; in the same year he organised and accompanied a special UN team to Afghanistan. In 1993 he was special envoy for the OSCE in Tajikistan and in the following year became head of OSCE’s Mission for Tajikistan. He has acted as a part-time consultant to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1984 . A specialist on Afghanistan, Iran, former Soviet Central Asia, the Middle East, political Islam and Muslims in Europe, he has written extensively. His books include: Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 1990); The Lessons of the Afghan War (Adelphi Paper, n° 259, International Institute of Strategic Studies, London, summer 1991); The Failure of Political Islam (Harvard University Press, 1994); The New Central Asia, The Creation of Nations (Tauris, 2000); Iran: comment sortir d’une révolution religieuse (with Farhad Khosrokhavar) (Le Seuil, 1999); Les illusions du 11 septembre (Le Seuil, Paris, 2002); L’islam mondialisé (Le Seuil, 2002); Islamist Networks, The Pakistan-Afghan Connection (Mariam Abou Zahab and Olivier Roy) (Hurst, London, 2003); Globalized Islam (Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2004). »
