Marc Semo

About Marc Semo

Editor-in-Chief at the daily newspaper Libération, responsible for international pages since 2008, Marc Semo is a historian by training. He received the Louis Hachette-Mumm Prize in 2002 for a report on “A City of Dogs” and is the author of two books: “Memoirs of a Golan Ambassador” about Romanian dissident Alexandre Paleologue (Balland) in collaboration with Claire Tréan, then at Le Monde, and “The Bosphorus Revolution” (Editions du Cygne) on the decade of power of the AKP, the Islamist-conservative party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the ambiguities of a “Turkish model” supposed to combine democracy, Islam, and economic dynamism that fascinated Europeans and the United States, before the authoritarianism of Turkey’s new strongman became evident. Passionate about contemporary history, he works notably with Jean-Jacques Becker and Annie Kriegel. After obtaining a degree at EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), he earned a diploma with Marc Ferro on Polish cinema and the post-Stalinism thaw. He also worked as an assistant director with Marc Ferro on his documentary films, including a series on the history of medicine for FR3, and on several documentaries produced by the Audiovisual Center of the École Normale Supérieure of Saint-Cloud. Journalism as immediate history fascinates him. He began writing in 1973 for the weekly Politique Hebdo Témoignage Chrétien and Le Monde Diplomatique. In 1978, he moved to Italy and started collaborating with Le Monde from 1980. In 1983, he began writing regularly for Libération. Initially as a freelance correspondent before joining the team as a correspondent in Rome until June 1989. He then returned to Paris to the editorial team to focus on Eastern Europe and the Balkans. As a senior reporter, he notably covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the two conflicts in Iraq (1991 and 2003), and dedicated numerous reports and investigations on Turkey. In 2008, he took charge of the diplomatic section and international relations at Libération while also heading the “world” department. He has led numerous round tables on these subjects during forums organized by the newspaper in Grenoble, Lyon, or Rennes. A regular contributor to the journal Politique Internationale and contributor to several collective works, he is regularly invited as a speaker or moderator in debates organized by IFRI (French Institute of International Relations) and IHEDN (Institute of Advanced Studies in National Defense) on major current topics.