Olivier Roy, born 1949, is a political scientist, diplomat, consultant and ambassador to the United Nations. He is research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and a professor at the Robert Schumann Centre of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. During the 1980s he was consultant for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and later, in 1994, he was heading the OSCE mission in Tajikistan. Roy has written numerous books about political Islam and Islamist terrorism and is one of the world’s leading experts on these subjects. His thesis’ cover a wide gambit of ideas, including the proposed failure of Islamism as political ideology, neofundamentalism and proselytisation, as well as the juxtaposition of radical Islamism and Islamic radicalisation in the context of the Paris attacks from 2015. In 2020 his book “Is Europe Christian?” (Oxford University Press, Oxford) will appear.