News

Last 27^th of November, Pascal Rey, Insuco Chief Executive Officer and associate researcher at the Institute for Social Research in Africa (IFSRA), had the pleasure to participate in the third edition of the annual conference on interculturality, organized in Paris by the French Military Staff specialized in overseas actions (EMSOME). EMSOME is, amongst other functions, the institution responsible for the training of soldiers on the physical, human, and cultural environments of the foreign territories where they will be deployed. This year, the theme chosen for the conference was “Operational Interculturality”.

During this conference, Pascal Rey had the opportunity to present concrete examples observed in various African countries of the challenges of understanding one another due to cultural differences between two armies, in the context of bilateral cooperation. In his presentation, he showed how such difficulties can have very negative impacts on the good implementation of military missions. In fact, if we can notice in the past few years a steady increase of bilateral and multilateral cooperation between armies, it seems therefore crucial to better take into account in the military training the importance of openness, mutual respect and dialogue in order to strengthen soldiers’ capacity to collaborate with other armies of diverse cultural backgrounds.

Many thanks to the EMSOME for their invitation and to all the participants for the quality of the exchanges!