One of the most striking aspects of the war with Iran is the extent to which it has highlighted the irrelevance of international organisations and multilateral approaches to resolving global conflicts.

If we take war as an indicator of the viability of the rules-based international order established after World War II, then we may well conclude that the “patient” is showing a very weak pulse.

The United Nations and the European Union are two organisations that epitomise the post-1945 global normative order – an order which is founded on principles such as the rule of law, non-aggression, and respect for sovereign states’ territorial integrity and political independence.

These principles, and the international organisations that embody then, are among the first casualties of the US-Israeli military campaign. How did this happen and what could be done in order to revitalise the patient?

The United Nations – a tale of a great power struggle and double standards

Beginning with the UN, the war with Iran has made it abundantly clear that the system of collective security system established after 1945 is largely disabled when a major power decides to go it alone. The UN Security Council was designated as the guardian of international peace and security, yet has been paralysed by the veto powers of its permanent members, which have time and again used their influence to shield their own actions and those of their allies from international scrutiny.

When the US and Israel launched strikes against Iran in late February 2026, the Security Council initially failed to come up with any kind of meaningful response, let alone authorise any measures to de-escalate the crisis. Instead, the conflict unfolded outside the framework of international law, with unilateral military actions becoming the norm rather than remaining the exception.

The Security Council eventually adopted a resolution on March 11, which focused narrowly on condemning Iran’s attacks on Gulf states. The resolution, passed with 13 votes in favour and abstentions from Russia and China, labelled Iran’s actions as “egregious attacks” and demanded an immediate halt to its regional aggression.

While the resolution is an important signal that the patient is still alive and that the UN has some residual willingness to protect the fundamental norms on which it was built, the resolution’s one-sided approach underscores the Security Council’s persistent double standards: the resolution makes no mention of the initial US-Israeli strikes on Iran that triggered the escalation, nor does it address the broader context of the conflict, such as the legality of those strikes or the killing of Iran’s supreme leader.

The deafening silence of the UN Security Council in the face of US and Israeli breaches of peremptory international law suggests, once more, the use of double standards and further undermines the credibility of the UN Security Council as the guardian of international peace and security.

However, while the Council is currently more or less paralysed, there is a procedure that could revitalise the UN in this geopolitical crisis, namely the Uniting for Peace procedure.

This mechanism empowers the UN General Assembly in the case of Security Council deadlock. If this has not been used yet in the Iran crisis, it is because there has not been sufficient political will to do so.

The EU: an actor with geopolitical ‘muscle’ but no willingness to use it

Another noteworthy (yet unsurprising) aspect of the Iranian conflict is the complete irrelevance of the European Union as a mediator and peacemaker.

The founding impetus for the EU was to build peace on the basis of multilateral cooperation and the non-violent resolution of disputes.

The EU sees itself as a normative power which seeks to project its values worldwide through the use of soft power but tends to shy away from applying coercion.

Unfortunately, the world we live in is one where the most powerful states in the system have decided that violence is now the preferred tool for pursuing foreign policy objectives – either by removing unfriendly regimes from power or by usurping foreign territories through armed aggression.

In this dog-eat-dog world, Europe seems helpless. The EU was neither consulted in the run-up to the Iran war, nor is it actively taking part in hostilities. Instead, it is watching from the sidelines, issuing futile calls for restraint and sabotaging itself in internal quarrels. This is regrettable, given Europe’s historical leadership in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal.

Why does the EU find itself watching from the sidelines in the most important geopolitical event of 2026?

For one, because it – again – has failed to speak with one voice. Member states have adopted divergent positions, with some expressing support of US-Israeli actions and others calling for restraint.

Spain, for instance, has risked open conflict with the Trump administration over the use of its military bases for the war effort, while other critical players, including Germany and France have expressed a certain degree of sympathy for the air strikes.

While it is easy to criticise the EU for its lack of unity on important geopolitical questions, this multiplicity of voices is actually an intended design feature of this hybrid entity, which combines both supranational and intergovernmental elements in its institutional architecture.

At the same time, this design feature actively undermines EU agency in important geopolitical matters. Another factor condemning the EU to futility in geopolitical crises is Europe’s dependency on the US for security and the lack of a common defence policy underpinned by a European army.

However, the biggest obstacle to EU agency in geopolitics is neither institutional nor material. It is psychological. There is no will to lead, no will to use a muscular approach to counter Trump’s blatant disregard of multilateralism and international law (values that are at the heart of Europe’s identity), and a naive belief that the transatlantic relationship will somehow repair itself.

Instead of leveraging its economic and diplomatic weight to push back against unilateral US actions, the EU has often defaulted to reactive, conciliatory gestures, hoping that transatlantic harmony will somehow be restored by goodwill alone. This reflects a fundamental miscalculation: the belief that the US, under Trump or any other leader, will eventually recognise and reward European loyalty, even as Washington’s actions demonstrate the opposite.

The good news is that this can be changed. Mindsets can be changed, identities can be reconstructed, and agency can be built.

The patient is weak, yet there is hope

So no, multilateralism isn’t dead. International organisations such as the UN and the EU have not only put in place norms and mechanisms that would allow them to play a critical role in geopolitical crises, they also have enormous resources at their disposal that would enable them to play such a role.

The patient’s pulse is thus weak, but there are effective remedies available to strengthen it. Now, we must muster the political will to implement them.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Theresa Reinold ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

Whether it’s documents in textbooks or fiction studied in literature classes, reading print remains a pillar in learning. But the audiobook craze opens up new possibilities.

Could listening to literary works become part of the curriculum as opposed to reading them? Is reading comprehension the same for listening to a text as it is for reading a book?’

Reading vs listening: seemingly limited differences

A meta-analysis published in the Review of Educational Research and taking into account the results of 46 studies conducted between 1955 and 2020, including a total of 4,687 child and adult participants, Virginia Clinton-Lisell, university lecturer and researcher in Educational Psychology at the University of North Dakota, found that levels of understanding do not differ significantly when the same texts are read or listened to.

This result can be compared to a study by Madison Berl and her colleagues, published in 2010 in the journal Brain and Language, showing that children aged 7 to 12 years activate common brain regions when listening to and reading stories.

These regions notably include a frontotemporal network involved in semantic and syntactic processing shared between the two exploration modalities, which the authors describe as the “comprehension cortex.”

A comparable network, to which the parietal region was added, was also activated among adults who listened to or read the same story in the study by Fatma Deniz et al., published in 2019 in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Reading allows you to go at your own pace

However, the Clinton-Lisell meta-analysis also highlights that understanding is more improved in reading than in listening when participants can read at their own pace. Reading indeed offers the possibility to freely adjust your reading speed: slowing down when encountering a difficulty, going back or checking information. This cognitive control is not an option when listening to a text whose rhythm is predetermined, without the possibility of naturally backtracking.

Reading proves especially more effective than listening when evaluating general and inferential comprehension, which is not the case for literal comprehension.

Listening comes with an imposed rhythm and auditory structure, which makes it more difficult to implement comprehension strategies and generate inferences (conclusions based on evidence and reasoning) – or links between the ideas derived from the text and our personal knowledge and memories.

Reading, on the contrary, offers greater freedom around mental organisation and promotes interpretative creativity, supported by processes for regulating attention and cognitive control.

When it comes to getting students to develop deeper thinking, reading remains the most effective modality. It stimulates the creation of inferences, essential for establishing the coherence of a text – which guarantees fine and deep understanding.

Listening and its emotional dimension

However, listening to a text has certain advantages, particularly in terms of the experience it offers.

It involves perception of voices, intonations and prosodies which, for people who are sensitive to them, adds a more direct affective and emotional dimension than silent reading. It can make texts more easily accessible to students with reading difficulties, reducing visual load and supporting continuity of attention.

However, listening also demands auditory attention, which is in itself a specific skill, mobilising both working memory and sustained attention. The task requires the listener to maintain sustained vigilance when facing a continuous verbal flow, which can represent a challenge for some students, especially those with difficulties in concentration or auditory processing. In this respect, listening promotes auditory immersion that generally improves the overall understanding of the narrative, even if it does not always offer the same degree of control for getting to grips with the details of the text.

A voice recording can strengthen the listener’s engagement and enrich the reception of a narrative text by accentuating the presence of the characters and the pace of how the story unfolds. Reading, on the other hand, allows for a form of inner dialogue and suspends time, which is conducive to reflection.

In Lire le monde, anthropologist Michèle Petit very subtly describes the power of the reading experience at any age. In the chapter entitled “What is the purpose of reading?” she evokes several of its virtues, including how reading allows us to withdraw from the chaos, to open ourselves up to other worlds and to self-construct. The section “Lifting your eyes away from your book” illustrates this singular experience particularly well: reading a text allows us to conjure up a thought, an image or a memory – whereas listening, which is comparatively more linear, favours less.

Forming a virtuous cognitive assemblage

In several of her books – the most recent being Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts (2025), Professor of Literature Katherine Hayles puts forward the concept of “cognitive assembly” to denote hybrid systems in which humans interact with technologies that extend their mental abilities. While this framework primarily pertains to the relationship between humans and computers, it can be expanded to include how we become one with reading and listening material.

Reading a text or listening to it fall under distinct forms of cognitive assemblies; each one taps differently into our senses, attention, memory and emotions. Learning to recognise these differences – and choosing the most suitable option for different purposes (in-depth reading or immersive listening) and our preferences (for visual and tactile, even olfactory, or auditory pursuits) – amounts to forming a virtuous cognitive assembly, capable of leveraging the richness of each mode of interaction with language and culture.

For schools, the challenge is not whether to choose between reading and listening, but to teach students to recognise the inherent value of each learning mode and think about how to combine the two.

Awareness of the different modes of exploring a text is part of differentiated instruction that is attentive to specific learning styles. It paves the way for fostering metacognition in education: observing each individual’s own way of learning, adjusting pace, and choosing the most suitable medium to fit a given context.

Knowing when to read, when to listen and how to switch from one to the other – or even combine the two modes – is about learning to adjust your way of learning, and, more broadly, to think for yourself.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Frédéric Bernard ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

L’énergie solaire est associée à des problèmes d’intermittence, car elle ne génère d’électricité que quand le soleil brille. Certains dispositifs photovoltaïques pourraient permettre de stocker le rayonnement solaire sous forme de chaleur, puis de récupérer l’énergie sous forme d’électricité.

Il est devenu courant de voir des panneaux solaires sur les toits des maisons et des hangars, grâce à la baisse du prix des cellules en silicium et à leur taille compacte. Cependant, l’énergie solaire est intermittente, comme beaucoup d’autres types d’énergie renouvelable. Lors des périodes de production maximale, comme les journées estivales ensoleillées, le réseau d’électricité sature d’énergie, tandis que lors des périodes de faible production, comme le soir et en hiver, l’offre diminue alors même que la demande est la plus élevée. C’est pourquoi, afin de garantir la disponibilité de l’énergie à la demande, des solutions de stockage doivent être intégrées au réseau.

La technologie la plus utilisée pour le stockage à l’échelle du réseau électrique est le stockage hydroélectrique par pompage, mais le nombre de sites favorables en France est limité et déjà largement exploité, du fait des contraintes géographiques.

Une autre technologie courante est la batterie électrochimique : l’exemple le plus commun est celui des batteries lithium-ion des téléphones portables et des voitures. À plus grande échelle, des entreprises, par exemple Enedis, commencent à investir dans de grands parcs de batteries pour soutenir le réseau électrique. La technologie dominante pour ces très grandes batteries est la technologie lithium-fer-phosphate.

En grande partie pour cette raison, l’Agence internationale de l’énergie (IEA) dans un report récent prévoit une croissance de 42 % de la demande de lithium en 2040 par rapport à 2020. Or, l’extraction du lithium soulève des enjeux géopolitiques et humanitaires. Récemment, la possibilité d’ouvrir d’une mine dans l’Allier a intensifié le débat en France : si ces mines ont des impacts négatifs sur l’eau potable, la biodiversité et les sols, peut-on réellement soutenir qu’elles nous aideraient vers un futur durable ?

Peut-on stocker l’énergie autrement et assurer la stabilité du réseau électrique ?

Le stockage thermique : une alternative aux batteries électrochimiques

Les barrages hydroélectriques et les batteries électrochimiques ne constituent pas la seule solution pour le stockage de l’énergie. Une alternative est le stockage thermique, où l’énergie est stockée sous forme de chaleur.

C’est par exemple le principe des chauffe-eau solaires. À plus grande échelle, le stockage thermique est surtout appliqué en combinaison avec des centrales solaires à concentration (CSP), comme le Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project aux États-Unis ou l’Andasol Solar Power Station en Espagne. Cependant, le CSP reste une technologie marginale, car ces grandes centrales nécessitent un investissement initial très important et les coûts de maintenance sont élevés.

Dans ce type d’installations, la première étape est la conversion d’énergie solaire en chaleur au moyen de grands miroirs – soit paraboliques, soit petits, plats et suivant le soleil – qui concentrent le rayonnement solaire pour chauffer un fluide (conventionnellement du sel fondu). La chaleur est convertie en électricité lors de la deuxième étape, où la chaleur stockée dans le fluide entraîne une turbine.

Malheureusement, la conversion de la chaleur en énergie utile, comme l’électricité, est particulièrement difficile : l’efficacité de la conversion est limitée fondamentalement par ce qu’on appelle « la loi de Carnot ». Par exemple : à 300 °C, le maximum théorique de l’efficacité est environ 50 %, ce qui signifie que l’efficacité réelle est encore plus basse. En comparaison, l’efficacité des batteries lithium-ion, qui ne passent pas par la case « chaleur », peut surpasser 90 %.

« Détourner » les cellules photovoltaïques pour convertir le rayonnement de la chaleur en électricité

Mais il existe une autre façon de convertir la chaleur en électricité : en utilisant le rayonnement émis par tout objet chaud (qui dépend de la température).

Tandis que les cellules photovoltaïques traditionnelles que l’on voit sur les toits et dans les fermes solaires convertissent le rayonnement solaire lui-même, l’idée de ce qu’on appelle les systèmes thermophotovoltaïques (abréviés TPV) est de récupérer le rayonnement infrarouge émis par n’importe quel objet chauffé – et qui stocke donc l’énergie sous forme de chaleur – et de la convertir en électricité.

Par exemple, le silicium fond à 1 414 °C et le graphite peut être chauffé jusqu’à plus de 2 000 °C. Ces matériaux émettent alors un rayonnement infrarouge, que l’on peut collecter grâce à des cellules photovoltaïques spéciales (comme des cellules en indium-gallium-arséniure). À de telles températures, la limite de Carnot est repoussée jusqu’à 83 % et 87 % respectivement. En pratique, les expériences réalisées au MIT, aux États-Unis, ont démontré une efficacité de plus de 40 %.

Différents dispositifs thermophotovoltaïques

Le dispositif le plus mature à ce jour n’utilise pas le rayonnement solaire pour chauffer le milieu de stockage, mais simplement l’électricité. Il est donc similaire à une batterie lithium-ion, mais effectue des conversions d’énergie successives « électricité → chaleur → électricité » au lieu de « électricité → énergie chimique → électricité ». De tels dispositifs promettent d’être compétitifs en raison de leurs coûts relativement faibles et aujourd’hui commencent à être commercialisés à l’échelle industrielle.

Il serait encore plus intéressant de chauffer le milieu de stockage directement avec le rayonnement solaire, comme pour le CSP conventionnel, afin que le système devienne une source d’énergie renouvelable non intermittente.

Pour cette raison, nous avons réalisé le premier prototype expérimental de ce dispositif, dont le milieu de stockage est chauffé à l’aide d’un rayonnement solaire concentré, et suit donc une conversion « solaire → chaleur → électricité ». Un avantage important de notre dispositif est qu’il pourrait être rentable à une échelle beaucoup plus réduite que les systèmes CSP actuels, du fait du remplacement de la turbine par les cellules thermophotovoltaïques (TPV).

Cependant, l’efficacité globale de ce nouveau type de batterie thermique (soleil → chaleur → électricité) — et notamment l’efficacité des cellules thermophotovoltaïques elles-mêmes (pour la conversion finale de chaleur en électricité) — doit encore être améliorée au laboratoire, afin que cette technologie devienne plus compétitive.

Vera Moerbeek a reçu des financements de l'École doctorale "énergie et environnement" (ED305).