Dual-use as Knowledge-Oriented Policy: France during the 1990-2000s

This contribution aims at demonstrating that dual-use policies represent now a dimension central to military R&D policies and should not be understood only as a transfer mechanism between the civilian and the military. The paper investigates the concept of dual-use policies in the framework of Knowledge-Oriented Policies (KOP). Il will elaborate on the conditions of the emergence and development of dual-use policies. From a conceptual perspective, it will point out the difficulty associated with sequential and linear interpretations of innovation processes associated with armaments programmes. The main important critic developed in this contribution relates to the simplistic view associated with armaments life cycle, which hardly accounts for the complexity of exchanges and the reality of decision-making in military R&D.