Welcome and thank you for visiting my website! My name is Eric Sangar, I am a political scientist and IR scholar trained in Germany, France, Belgium, the UK, and Italy. I currently work as an Associate Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po Lille, where I am also a member of the social science research centre CERAPS.

My research interests reflect the diversity of my personal and professional background. Since my doctoral studies at the European University Institute, I have been interested in the ways in which organisational and societal representations of history, including collective memory, shape and constrain the understanding and legitimation of military and political decision-making in contemporary foreign policy and military interventions. This also the theme of my forthcoming book: "Germany's Grand Strategy: The Search for Lost Resonance", to be published with Oxford University Press in June 2026. As part of previous research collaborations I have also studied the roles of NGOs in conflict discourse, the ways in which emotions can be mobilised to justify the use of political violence, as well as the influence of quantitative data on conflict perceptions.

Last but not least, I am currently exploring the ways in which "new" methods of anticipating future risks and threats, including the use of design fiction and AI, influence institutional imagineries of the future but also organizational agendas. If you are a researcher or practitioner working in this area, please feel free to reach out!

My research methods are as diverse as my interests. I have used interview-based qualitative case studies, corpuslinguistic analysis, critical discourse analysis, as well as most recently pedagogical expertiments. I am convinced that the research object and the chosen theoretical approach should inform methodological choices, and not the other way round.

I would be interested in supervising doctoral projects related to my research areas, and especially on the topics of collective memory and foreign policy, threat anticipation, and Franco-German relations. I am also interested in other topics, as long as they can be situated in the discipline of International Relations and pursue an innovative research puzzle. If you are intersted in untertaking a doctoral project under my supervision please send a fully referenced project of minimum 4 pages with a clear research question and at least a preliminary research hypothesis.