Paris Peace Forum 2025 | 29-30 Oct.
Photo AFP/ Joël Saget.
Justin Vaïsse dans les locaux du Forum de Paris sur la Paix, octobre 2025.
Paris, December 11, 2025 – Justin Vaïsse, Founder of the Paris Peace Forum in 2018, will become the first President of the new Endowment Fund, whose mission is to ensure the organization's long-term financial sustainability. He will step down as Executive Director during the year 2026. The Forum's Executive Board has launched a recruitment process to appoint his successor.
The creation of the endowment fund, announced during the last edition of the Forum this autumn, aims to generate stable income to finance the organization’s activities and support its ambition to “reinvent diplomacy in a changing world”. The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), one of the Forum’s founding members, pursues its commitment and becomes the first donor, with a pledge of 10 million euros.
“I am very proud of what we have collectively accomplished: the Paris Peace Forum has solidified its standing. We have a young and dynamic team at the Permanent Secretariat, with top-tier directors, balanced accounts, an endowment fund that has made an excellent start thanks to His Highness the Aga Khan, a strong global reputation, a growing number of partners who believe in our mission, and a promising year ahead in 2026 thanks to the synergy we will create with France’s G7 presidency,” he told the Executive Committee and General Assembly members.
The 8th edition of the Paris Peace Forum, which took place on October 29 and 30 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, overlooking the Eiffel Tower, was a resounding success with a record number of 455 speakers across 81 sessions.
Beyond the annual event, the Forum also supports new coalitions and project leaders throughout the year on major global challenges, AI, climate, and childhood. The method remains the same: addressing global challenges by bringing together a diverse range of international actors, from policymakers to foundations, experts, and private companies.
About Justin Vaïsse:
Justin Vaïsse is the Founder and Director General of the Paris Peace Forum, an independent non-profit organization he created in 2018 with support from French President Emmanuel Macron. The Paris Peace Forum is an annual event that aims at promoting new rules and solutions to address the global challenges of our time. The eighth edition took place on October 29 and 30, 2025, at the Palais de Chaillot, bringing together heads of state and international organizations, as well as 4,000 participants from the private sector, NGOs, foundations, and civil society at large.
Prior to that role, Justin Vaïsse was Director of Policy Planning at the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs for more than 6 years. In this role, he advised the Minister and the President on their 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, where he initiated several projects, including the Brookings Eurozone Survey and the European Foreign Policy Scorecard with the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) – an annual evaluation of Europe’s performance on the world stage.
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.
For media enquiries, please contact : media@parispeaceforum.org
About the Paris Peace Forum: The Forum is a platform to originate, shape & share multi-actor responses towards global peace & sustainable prosperity. By convening key decision-makers and fostering collaboration between governments, international organizations, businesses, and civil society, we ensure that diplomacy is not just discussed but reinvented to meet the demands of a changing world. For more information, visit parispeaceforum.org.
