Josselin Droff and Julien Malizard, were involved in the 40th anniversary of the Centre for Political and Societal Studies (CEPEL) organised on 14 and 15 December 2023 at the University of Montpellier.
Entitled «Le territoire dans tous ses états» («Territory in all its states»), this conference featured presentations by researchers from the Chair as part of the session on "Defence policies and public finances: an overview".
Based on the question «How much do France's wars cost?» and drawing on their own work as well as defence economics literature, the authors addressed the issue of cost of external operations and preparing France for future conflicts:
- In the current context of discussions on «the war economy» and the 2024-2030 Military Programming Law (LPM), the researchers proposed a global reflection on the intensity and cost of commitments of France .
- The authors have shown that France's commitments, the additional cost of which is currently in excess of 1.5 billion euros a year, The average duration of these contracts has increased.
- Nevertheless, in a historical perspective, the extra cost of external operations when compared with the cost of the same operations in the same country. macroeconomic variables such as the State budget or GDP remains low.
- In addition to the problems of financing, the increase in commitments raises the question of long-term sustainability.
This intervention is also part of the ANR-22-CE53-0007 PolisInWar project supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and led by Jean Joana, Professor of Political Science at the University of Montpellier.
