Roy was a research director at the
French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a lecturer for both the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (
EHESS) and the IEP. From 1984 to 2008, he was a consultant for the
French Foreign Ministry. In 1988, he served as a consultant for the United Nations Office for Coordinating Relief in Afghanistan (UNOCA). Beginning in August 1993, Roy was a special
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) representative to
Tajikistan until February 1994. From that time until October 1994 he was appointed the head of the OSCE mission to Tajikistan. Roy wrote books on Iran, Islam, and Asian politics including
Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, ''Today's Turkey: A European State?
and The Illusions of September 11
. He serves on the editorial board of the academic journal Central Asian Survey. His best-known book, L'Echec de I'Islam Politique
(1992), The Failure of Political Islam'' (1994), is a standard text for students of
political Islam. Roy wrote widely on the
2005 civil unrest in France, rebutting the suggestion that the violence was inspired by religion. He argues that Islamism is merely a
rubric under which troubled youth enact their violent inclinations, a view adamantly opposed by Roy's intellectual rival,
Gilles Kepel. Roy's book
Secularism Confronts Islam (
Columbia, 2007) offers a perspective on the place of Islam in secular society and looks at the diverse experiences of Muslim immigrants in the West. Roy examines how Muslim intellectuals made it possible for Muslims to live in a secularized world while maintaining the identity of a "true believer." In 2010 he published
Holy Ignorance, When Religion and Culture Part Ways, an analysis of religion, ethnicity and culture and the results when these part ways. After the Charlie Hebdo shooting he argued that most French Muslims were committed to prevent violence, Roy has said "I have been accused of disregarding the link between terrorist violence and the religious radicalisation of Islam through
Salafism, the ultra-conservative interpretation of the faith. I am fully aware of all of these dimensions; I am simply saying that they are inadequate to account for the phenomena we study, because no causal link can be found on the basis of the empirical data we have available." ==Other activities==