As a senior researcher at NIOD and professor of War Cultures at Utrecht University, I study the ways in which people and societies deal with war and mass violence. 

War cultures are the set of behaviors, ideas, and practices that enable societies to commit and endure large-scale violence. To gain more insight into these processes, I use transnational, global history and micro-historical approaches, which I combine with methods from the social sciences and the digital humanities. 

My main focus is currently on deprivation of rights, especially the granting and loss of nationality and citizenship, especially in times of war and post-war or inter-war periods. I investigate these themes for my book about the so-called 'Nansen refugees': the first, very heterogeneous group of stateless refugees for whom international agreements were made (1920s-1950s). I focus on the question of what those agreements meant in practice, how they ended or perpetuated practices from the period of the First World War and how this developed over time (including a new world war). In doing so, I will discuss topics such as inclusion and exclusion, loyalty and betrayal, communities of care, enemies within, illegality and deportation, displacement, silences and complex historical sources.

Humans are 'meaning makers': when they feel that the world around them does not make sense, they will create meaning. In our time of widespread violence and polarization, this makes many of us inclined to think that the world is full of enemies that we have to eliminate or run away from. These processes of mobilization – the discursive construction of an enemy and the legitimization of violence – play out at all levels, from interpersonal relationships to global interactions. In this way, our processes of meaning making can sustain fear and violence.

War cultures are therefore not just something from the past or something that is about others. I want to investigate them so that we, as academics, teachers, citizens and all those other roles and identities we have, understand how we (inadvertently) continue to reproduce violent ways of thinking and acting. When we have that insight, we can let go of them and turn towards ways of thinking and acting that are not violent and can instead support and sustain life (regenerative cultures).

With my writing and teaching I help to open up to the experiences of others so that we can break down barriers and re-build our world from an understanding of shared humanity.