Manuel Lafont Rapnouil has been the director of the Centre for Analysis, Planning and Strategy (CAPS) at the French ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs since July 2019. A career diplomat, he has worked most particularly on international peace and security as well as on multilateral affairs. From 2011 to 2015, he headed the division for Political Affairs at the department for United Nations, International Organisations, Human Rights and Francophonie, a division in which he had previously served between 2002 and 2005. He was also posted to the French Embassy in Washington DC under the Bush and Obama administration.
Lafont Rapnouil has a long experience of policy planning and strategic work. He had already worked at the French Policy Planning staff between 2005 and 2008, when he was in charge of multilateral affairs. In 2007-2008, he was also a rapporteur for both drafting committees in charge of the French White Paper on Defence and National Security and the French White Paper on European and Foreign Policy. And he worked twice for leading international think tanks: the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) between 2008-2010; and most recently the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), for which he was head of the Paris Office and Senior Policy Fellow from 2015 to 2019.