French academic Hélène Carrère d'apos; Encausse (Paris, 1929) won the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences on Wednesday. Carrère has been a member of the French Academy of Language since 1990, the year in which she was appointed perpetual secretary general.
In her book L'Empire éclaté, published in 1978, she predicted the collapse of the USSR, attributing it to the high birth rate in the Muslim republics of Central Asia.