On January 22, 2024, Anastasia Lavrina, spokesperson for the Ilham Aliyev regime, whose political affiliation is no mystery - as we saw with the latest presidential “elections” in Azerbaijan - announced an interview with Emmanuel Dupuy.
Anastasia Lavrina is a regular contact for Azerbaijan lobbyists in France. For example, she can be found celebrating Ilham Aliyev on “Musulmans en France”, a website run by pro-Azerbaijan lobbyist Jean-Michel Brun.
Emmanuel Dupuy, born July 29, 1971 in Forbach, is a professor of geopolitics and a “researcher”. He is a regular contributor to Atlantico, but is also sometimes invited to speak on media such as BFMTV.
Emmanuel Dupuy is also President of the Institut de Prospective & Stratégie en Europe (IPSE), a think-tank “specializing in geopolitical, geo-economic and geo-cultural issues [...] in the Euro-Atlantic, Euro-African and Eurasian regions”.
In October 2016, Emmanuel Dupuy was seen with co-founder of “L'Opinion”, Claude Leblanc, and Guillem Monsonis, then editor-in-chief of TTU, on a visit to Azerbaijan to “report on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, Nagorno-Karabakh”.
2017 was, as for many others, a turning point in Emmanuel Dupuy's lobbying activities. He travels to Azerbaijan once again, and makes numerous speeches and pronouncements in favor of Azerbaijan, notably in opinion forums.
An article is co-authored in November 2017 by Emmanuel Dupuy on “Opinion Internationale”, then shared by Azertac and the Azerbaijani Embassy in France. Paul Azibert, co-author, is introduced as an IPSE associate researcher. The article praises Ilham Aliyev's regime.
Except that, at the same time, Paul Azibert was in fact a “public affairs and communications consultant”. In 2020, he and Dupuy found themselves at a meeting organized by the 02A influence club, among other professionals in the field.
Emmanuel Dupuy knows this world: he is himself a “defense and security consultant”, and worked for Azerbaijan's UNESCO campaign in 2017. According to La Lettre, in 2020, he is “still gravitating towards the embassy”.
Already in 2016, “Africa Intelligence” claimed that Emmanuel Dupuy had been hired as a consultant by Rached Ghannouchi, leader of the Tunisian Islamist party Ennahda, close to the Muslim Brotherhood.
In the years that followed, Emmanuel Dupuy continued to be interviewed by the Azerbaijani media, to whom he offered the propaganda arguments of the Aliyev regime, under cover of his “French expert” title and his position at IPSE.
In February 2020, Dupuy gravitated so much to the embassy that he used the IPSE to organize the presentation of the book by Rahman Mustafayev, then ambassador of Azerbaijan, with the France-Azerbaijan Dialogue Association and Laurent Poultier du Mesnil, its vice-president.
Emmanuel Dupuy rubs shoulders with the heads of Azerbaijan lobbying in France: Poultier du Mesnil, Aytan Mouradova, Gunel Safarova and others. IPSE has become/continues to be the means of disseminating Azerbaijani propaganda, through the organization of meetings and “round tables”.
In 2021, IPSE is still organizing events to spread Azerbaijani propaganda. In July, Emmanuel Dupuy is invited to the “liberated territories” in Artsakh. In his speeches, he follows the themes of official Azerbaijani rhetoric.
It's here that Anastasia Lavrina meets Emmanuel Dupuy and conducts an interview with him for CBC TV. He also meets Anar Karimov, former head of Azerbaijan's permanent delegation to UNESCO, and now Azerbaijan's Minister of Culture.
In the years that followed, Emmanuel Dupuy continued to take the floor whenever he could to defend Azerbaijan's actions and call for closer ties with France.
In 2022 and 2023, he continues to be mentioned alongside another mouthpiece for Azerbaijani propaganda in France, Jean-Dominique Merchet, in Zaur Sadigbayli's publications.
Apart from Azerbaijan, Emmanuel Dupuy seems to be close to Kazakhstan, as is Joaquinito Alogo de Obono, who we mentioned in another article. In particular, he appears to be close to Jean Galiev, Kazakhstan's ambassador to France.
Emmanuel Dupuy also preaches in favor of Morocco's foreign policy, particularly in the context of the conflict in Western Sahara. Morocco is at the center of a scandal involving influence-peddling operations in France and Europe.
It's also worth remembering that between 2017 and 2019, IPSE took part in the colloquia of the Club Géopolitique, a think-tank set up at the time to spread Qatar's influence in France, and whose president was at the center of a scandal.
Also interesting to note: on August 3, 2020, Emmanuel Dupuy signed an op-ed in the “Valeurs Actuelles” newspaper discrediting the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Burkina Faso.
However, it was later proved that this column was part of a vast smear campaign targeting the ICRC, orchestrated by an Israeli influential company: Percepto.
For his part, Emmanuel Dupuy acknowledged that he “received the information he needed to write his article from Samuel Sellem”, a Franco-Israeli who specializes in influence campaigns.
Recently, more shocked by Azerbaijan's anti-French campaign than by the ethnic cleansing in Artsakh, Emmanuel Dupuy criticized this strategy, which displeased Jean-Michel Brun, Azerbaijan lobbyist and editor-in-chief of Musulmans en France.
However, this should not obscure the fact that Emmanuel Dupuy is still a supporter of the Azerbaijani authorities, who cite him as such, and mobilize him in their media as Anastasia Lavrina just did in January 2024.
In short, Emmanuel Dupuy embodies the prostitution of a certain segment of the research community to the interests of states that agree to pay for public speaking and event organization services. The IPSE, an empty shell (whose website has been inaccessible for over a year), serves only to lend credibility to these statements behind a pompous name. This strategy has already been discussed on our page. And it works: Emmanuel Dupuy is still invited onto TV shows and into editorial offices.
The Aliyev dictatorship continues to benefit from the actions of this type of figure, laundering its crimes and preparing for its wars.
