About DuMonde

DuMonde Lab was born one night during my thesis research, in the middle of the Cambridge Analytica investigation. I had opened too many threads for a single piece of academic work, and most of them did not fit the doctrinal frame I had to submit. But all of them pointed to the same thing: we were not seeing what was happening to the European informational space, and the institutional response was running years behind the phenomenon.

I had been watching for some time how social platforms appeared and grew, how patterns of digital behaviour consolidated, how the public sphere fragmented into overlapping realities. And, in parallel, I was living — and still live — a rich life away from screens, with people, places and conversations that almost never showed up in the digital versions of the world circulating around me.

That gap became sharper when I looked at what was close. The people we choose and the people we inherit no longer share the same present. The first tend to resemble us more than is wise; the second, increasingly, speak from realities we can no longer share.

DuMonde Lab was born of that observation, and of the suspicion that the problem calls for new lenses — not just more fact-checking, not just more regulation, not just more media literacy. It calls for patient work on the psychological, algorithmic and geopolitical mechanisms that produce fragmentation, and on the institutional tools that can respond to them without reproducing them.

The name has been with me for ten years. It started as something else — an early-stage project that aimed to align corporate behaviour with the Sustainable Development Goals — and gradually shifted until it found its current form. But it has always carried the same underlying motivation: we all inhabit the same world.

We are all human. We have differences, yes, but above all we have similarities. DuMonde — of the world — is the explicit opposite of the primary differentiating act, that founding political gesture of dividing between friend and enemy. I find myself far more connected to a proverb of the desert:

The project is conceived as a space to democratise knowledge, to foster joint work, to cooperate and teach one another. A form of soft power that does not come from any state, but from civic capacity and from the most ancestral tool that has driven human societies forward: the ability to cooperate.

It is, in other words, the most diplomatic thing I have to offer the world in favour of peace.

Cognitive sovereignty is not a slogan. It is a capacity: the capacity of an individual, a community or an institution to form, sustain and revise their beliefs under conditions designed to capture their attention and steer their emotions. The loss of that capacity — collective, not individual — is what is reorganising the European political map today.

In practice, working on cognitive sovereignty means three things:

The work is organised in three connected lines, not in silos.

The three lines hold each other up. Without research, tools would be improvisation. Without tools, research would be literature. Without training, all of it would be analysis without a recipient.

Four practical commitments structure every product that comes out of DuMonde:

DuMonde is not an original idea. It is a reorganisation of classical theories read through a specific lens: peaceful, cooperative, and — above all — feminine.

The lineage is organised across six thematic territories: identity and social psychology · political emotion · narrative and discursive power · technology and surveillance · cooperation and governance · ethics of care and resistance. The constellation below brings together the foundational core. The extended directory holds the complete genealogy.

The eighteen thinkers at the core

Rigour. Every claim in a DuMonde publication is backed by an accessible source. Every methodology declares its limitations explicitly in the document itself.

Transparency. Tools, data and methodologies verifiable by third parties. Code under open licence. Funding sources publicly documented.

Ethics. Data obtained with explicit consent or from genuinely public sources. Where there is doubt, we document and consult.

Traceability. Every document can be cited precisely: author, date, version, changes. No content published without verifiable attribution.

Public commitments for the current year:

• Closing the contribution to the Atlas stratégique des armées françaises 2026, chapter 2: note on the civil-military cognitive defence gap.
• Publication of two working papers: operational framework for emotional governance and polarisation diagnostic method for institutional contexts.
• Opening of the first cohort of the Fellows Programme.
• Public release of Bubble Lens and Buzón de Escucha.

Five-year ambition: a recognised European reference in the operationalisation of cognitive sovereignty. Recurrent institutional contracts. Active Fellows network across at least seven countries.

We do not believe cognitive defence is won by chasing false content piece by piece.

We believe it is won by understanding why certain narratives become contagious, and by changing our own way of communicating first. That it is won in the plural, not in the singular. With cooperation, not surveillance. In three languages at once, not in one alone. Slowly, and in writing.