Olivier Roy

Olivier Roy (1949) is a French political scientist and Islamologist, and a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, within the Department of Social and Political Sciences and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS). He was previously a senior researcher at the CNRS and a professor at the EHESS in Paris.

He headed the OSCE mission in Tajikistan (1993–1994) and served as an adviser to the Office of the United Nations Coordinator for Afghanistan (1988). He was also project leader for the European ‘ReligioWest’ project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), which focused on the study of the presence of religions in the Western public sphere. His main areas of research include political Islam, processes of radicalisation, the contemporary Middle East, the presence of Islam in the West and the comparison of religious systems.

Professor Roy obtained the ‘Agrégation de Philosophie’ in 1972 and a PhD in political science. He was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008–2009.

His best-known works include Globalized Islam(Columbia University Press, 2004) and Holy Ignorance (Oxford University Press, 2010; republished in Italy by Feltrinelli in 2017). His most recent works include En quête de l’Orient perdu (Seuil, 2014) and Generazione ISIS (Feltrinelli, 2017).

He is currently working on issues relating to Islamic law in the public sphere, conversions and apostasy, from a comparative religious perspective.