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ten Dam

Caspar ten Dam, PhD Student (BA, MA Leiden, Holland)
ctendam01@qub.ac.uk

Thesis
‘A comparative conflict analysis on the nature and behaviour of rebel movements in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union since the end of the Cold War’ 

The thesis compares the aims and methods of violence used by Albanian, Chechen and Tajik insurgents and their founders during the last Cold War period of 1979-1989, the first post-Cold War period of 1990-2001, and the second post-Cold War period after ‘September 11’. This study must help to answer the following question: do rebels brutalize conflicts or can conflicts brutalize rebels? It will test the contrasting theories of ‘deprivation-cum-grievance’ and ‘depredation-cum-greed’, by assessing their theoretical merits and determining their empirical validities. It will also offer a critique on the ‘new war’ theory developed by Martin van Creveld, Mary Kaldor and others, a theory that distinguishes between ‘sincere’ ideology-driven rebellions during and prior to the Cold War and ‘fake’ crime-driven rebellions after the Cold War whereby each group represents a fundamentally different kind of war. Though this theory – very much a variant of the ‘depredation’ theory of conflict – has serious shortcomings, it has helped to lay bare the undeniable increases of criminal and criminalized non-state actors destabilizing and brutalizing conflict areas. The thesis seeks to determine whether and to what extent the rebel groups selected for comparison do conform to the picture of the ‘semi-criminal terrorist’, depending on the definitions of political violence and (im)morality one adopts. For this we will distinguish, evaluate, and conditionally choose from divergent moral concepts ranging from the universality of (Western?) human rights to the particularity of local customs and beliefs that may or may not concord with principles of international law. We wish not just to enhance our insights into the causes, dynamics and consequences of post-Cold War internal conflicts purely out of scientific curiosity, but also, with these new understandings, to adapt and improve attempts to prevent, halt resolve or at least manage i.e. ‘freeze’ such conflicts.

Areas of Research

Causes and consequences of armed conflicts; forms of political violence, including terrorism and banditry; democratization, human rights and humanitarian intervention; state formation and disintegration in (post-)Communist and/or multi-ethnic states, particularly in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.

Supervisors:  Professor Adrian Guelke and Dr Roberto Belloni

Publications

  • Confidential: ‘The Kosovo Liberation Army and its impact on the Kosovo Conflict’ (2000), for the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP), Terrorism Prevention Branch (TPB), Vienna, Austria. Non-confidential parts of this report are being incorporated into my thesis.
  • Promotional: ‘Research into political unrest for international agencies, governments and non-profit organizations’ (2002), downloadable from http://www.damconsult.nl.
  • Historical: ‘Wir haben es gewußt! History of the Political Committee ‘Stari Most’, 1992-2002’ (2003), a book about a radical, pro-interventionist Dutch action group and its views on what should be done and should have been done in the former Yugoslavia. It is mostly in Dutch, though some parts are in English. For more information email caspartendam@hotmail.com; one copy available at Study- and Information Centre of Human Rights (SIM) in the Horstman Library of ‘PIOOM’, University of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
  • Opinion: ‘Srebrenica and the two kinds of courage that never came’ (2004), see http://www.ichuminterv.org, link ‘Archive’.