IRIS was founded in 1991 as the result of a private initiative. Despite the French field of international relations being rather narrow, IRIS has gradually succeeded in becoming a reference among the French think tanks specialised in strategic and international issues.

IRIS was founded with a view to meeting three main goals:
> Contributing to the research and the debates around strategic and international issues by offering a different and original analysis of national and international issues;
> Creating a really independent centre of expertise;
> Creating a space for dialogue and reflection in which all the members of the strategic community, that is specialists from different professional and philosophical backgrounds (i.e., policy makers, senior officials, industrialists, military leaders, experts and academics) could share their views.

The activities of IRIS are centred on issues related to foreign policy and strategy, as well as to security and defence. IRIS is an independent centre of expertise, and its team of experts, its networks and the quality of its analyses make it a partner of choice for companies which aim to expand their activities into foreign countries, as well as a credible interlocutor for public institutions. Through its numerous exchanges with foreign research centres and with the economic, political and diplomatic worlds, IRIS has been able to build a network of specialists throughout the world, which has enabled it to develop and deepen its activities and to extend its audience and, thus, to become a real think tank.