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Created in 1998, the scientific prizes of the Institut des hautes études de défense nationale are awarded each year to young and established researchers whose work enriches thinking in the fields of defence, national security and international strategic issues. For the first time this year, on 20 November, a special prize will be awarded for a chapter in a collective work, in addition to the thesis prize and the Master 2 dissertation prize.
This 2025 edition saw a sharp increase in the number of applications: 71 in total, compared with 24 in 2024 and 23 in 2023. In detail, applicants submitted 34 master's theses, 24 doctoral dissertations and 13 articles or chapters in collective works.
An independent scientific jury, made up of leading academics and IHEDN representatives, selected four winners from among the entries, two of whom tied for the memory prize. The winners were :
- Special prize (1 000 €) : Camille Escudé, A geopolitics of the Arctic Council: when politics (un)shapes geographical space, chapter published in The Arctic in the international system (Presses universitaires du Québec, 2024).
- Memory prize (€1,500 each, tied): Nathan Hourcade, Diplomatic relations between France and Ukraine as a new international player at the end of the USSR (1985-2005), Université Paris Cité, and Pierre-Nicolas Nabet, The impact of strategic cyber warfare: a reassessment of US cyber doctrine in the light of the Russian-Ukrainian war, Sciences Po Paris and King's College London.
- Thesis prize (3 500 €) : Sophia Mahroug, The Sacred Defence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards according to digital sources: from the Iran-Iraq war to the «soft war» (1981-2024), Sorbonne University and the University of Luxembourg.
Sophia Mahroug is an assistant professor in the history of international relations at Sorbonne Abu Dhabi. She holds degrees from Sorbonne University in literary Arabic and history, and in Persian from INALCO and the Dehkhoda Institute in Tehran.
His thesis shows how the Revolutionary Guards drew on the narrative of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) to form a historical science, a cultural policy and a military doctrine in the Islamic Republic of Iran, while gradually consolidating their control over the country. Based on digital sources and different methods of’OSINT, His research aims to reformulate a political history of Iran in the 20th century.e and XXIe centuries from natively digital sources.
Sophia Mahroug was also awarded the 2025 prize for a thesis in political science and international relations by the Institut d'études de l'islam et des sociétés du monde musulman (IISMM) and the Groupement d'intérêt scientifique Moyen-Orient et mondes musulmans (GIS MOMM) of the CNRS. This work will give rise to a book to be published by Presses universitaires de France in September 2026.
Created just a few weeks after Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran on 11 February 1979, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC, in Persian « Sepāh-e pāsdārān-e enqelāb-e eslāmī ») now has several hundred thousand members, often called «pasdarans» in the West, active in all sectors of this country of 88 million inhabitants. «The figures announced most often range between 150,000 and 200,000, including the Bassij reservists», says Sophia Mahroug. «It should be pointed out that these estimates do not include the administrative staff of the Corps» various political, cultural and economic organisations, who could make up 600,000 people at most. These figures should be treated with caution.»
WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTIONARY GUARD CORPS, A PARAMILITARY BODY AS OLD AS THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN?
Since its creation in April 1979, the main distinction between the Revolutionary Guards Corps and other armies has been its ideological mission. Beyond the strict military framework, the Guardians distinguish themselves from the regular army of imperial heritage, the’Artesh, to defend the principles of the Islamic Republic, based on what is known as the Guidance of the Jurist (now Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei), the velayet-e feqih.
It is this foundation that explains the involvement of the Revolutionary Guards in the political, economic, sporting, cultural and even diplomatic fields, with the help of its foreign special forces, the Al-Quds Forces. In addition to its military missions at sea, on land, in the air and in the cyber world, the Guardians Corps has a large economic monopoly in a country that is still being squeezed by sanctions. Another important feature of the Guardians is their stranglehold on a wide range of sectors, including construction and public works, banking, insurance, cultural organisations and telecommunications.
It is precisely this eclecticism that makes the Revolutionary Guards a paramilitary legion that is difficult to understand today: after more than forty years in the Iranian economy and in diplomatic affairs, military rank is no longer the only attribute that can sociologically define a Revolutionary Guard.
WHY DID YOU TAKE AN INTEREST IN THE SUBJECT FROM THE ANGLE OF «DEMATERIALISED MEMORY», I.E. DIGITAL MEMORY?
I became interested in digital sources and the various methods of analysing massive data because of an obstacle common to all specialists in contemporary Iran: that of the field. While I was doing my Master's research in Tehran on a museum commemorating the Iran-Iraq war that was financed by the Guardians, I experienced a national Internet blackout put in place by the Iranian authorities for around ten days, following a wave of demonstrations against the increase in fuel prices in November 2019.
This experience, far from dissuading me from research, transformed my practices because it revealed two things to me. Firstly, the massive investment in the Web and digital social networks by the Revolutionary Guards, whether in the media, in scientific literature or in more personal forms of expression such as blogs or Telegram channels, made me understand the plurality of opinions and careers within the Corps of the Revolutionary Guards.
Secondly, the possibility of browsing a handful of applications and web pages authorised by the regime during this blockade drew boundaries within the Web that needed to be analysed. Unlike the physical world that was closing before my eyes, the Web was full of exceptional empirical material for studying the central place occupied by culture, science and the memory of the Iran-Iraq war in the military doctrine of the Revolutionary Guards Corps.
AS A HISTORIAN BY TRAINING, YOU MADE EXTENSIVE USE OF DIGITAL TOOLS FOR THIS THESIS. IN WHAT WAY, AND WITH WHAT RESULTS?
My thesis was mainly based on a combined approach, also known as «multi-scalar». This method is based on both qualitative consultation of sources, mainly through manual research and reading of online information, and quantitative processing of the latter (methods of crawling or use of APIs, for example).
This combination of methods enabled me to avoid as far as possible a disembodied analysis of the men and institutions that made up the Corps of Guardians. The historian's method, which is a science of traces and clues, is not very different from that of OSINT, an expression now in vogue to designate the investigation of sources available online.
This type of investigation carried out on these various traces (testimonies, scientific articles, photographs, etc.) revealed to me many elements about the eminence grise of the Guardians of the Revolution, their dissensions, their evolution as well as their practices of political power and business. By «eminence grise», I mean several Guardians who remain in the shadows but who are involved in academic and intellectual fields.
ONE OF THE MAIN THEMES OF YOUR THESIS IS THAT THE CGRI IS VERY CONCERNED WITH ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY. HOW DOES IT GO ABOUT THIS, AND TO WHAT EXTENT DOES THIS «STORYTELLING» REFLECT THE REALITY OF ITS ACTIONS?
The discovery on the Web of an IRGC historiographical school run by an «eminent scholar» - as the Guardians like to call him - has significantly refined my work. More than just «storytelling», some of the Revolutionary Guards have been working to develop a science of history since the early 1980s, at the height of the war with Iraq, using documents recovered by former young Guardians on behalf of Iranian military intelligence.
These young apprentices, who are now portrayed on the Web as «historians» or «narrators» of the IRGC, were in fact informers for the Guardians, who subsequently became the Corps' thinkers - sometimes critics. Far from being insignificant, this discovery allows us to make a prodigious change in our reading of the Guardians in terms of domestic politics and international relations: historical science, like culture, forms the ideological basis of the military doctrine of the Revolutionary Guards, who think their struggle over the long term and who are gradually clearing themselves of the Shiite clergy, in that they are proposing new frameworks of thought, a new way of thinking, a new way of thinking, a new way of thinking, a new way of thinking, a new way of thinking, a new way of thinking. episteme.
WHAT ARE THE MAIN CHANGES YOU SEE IN THE TIMEFRAME OF YOUR STUDY (1981-2024), IN TERMS OF BOTH CONTENT AND FORM?
I believe that the main evolution of the Revolutionary Guards lies in their ability to become true technocrats and seasoned businessmen, far from the image of idolatrous revolutionaries that has followed them since their creation. The field of culture, central to the formulation of the soft war or information war, highlights a Praetorian Guard that has been emancipating itself from its Guide since 1989, Ayatollah Khamenei.
The quest for power and financial interests, sometimes mixed with sincere political convictions, have fragmented the IRGC through infighting. Faced with the serious economic difficulties and political crisis that Iran has been going through, especially since 2018, museum officials and military experts in bypassing the armed struggle belonging to the IRGC are increasingly seeking to free themselves from clerical authority in order to fulfil their individual potential, in the name of political and economic pragmatism.
«WILL THE GUARDIANS AGREE TO REMAIN IN THE SHADOWS FOREVER?»
The findings of my thesis will, I hope, offer some clues as to the future of the Islamic Republic: what will become of the velayet-e-faqih, The question is: will it be a «martyr», the ideological foundation of the regime since 1979, when its 86-year-old Guide dies?
Will the Revolutionary Guards, some of whom fought long before 1979 for the existence of an Islamic Republic in Iran, agree to remain in the shadows forever when a cleric and/or son of Ayatollah Khamenei succeeds him to become the highest authority in Iranian politics?
