I first met Caspar during one of the regular drawing evening hosted by Draw Club Leiden in 2023. We struck up a conversation covering various topics, including art, culture, and (geo)politics. I quickly became impressed by his depth of knowledge about historical events and their geopolitical implications, especially regarding those in the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union.
It’s no surprise, then, that we later collaborated on several projects, such as organizing and developing the Draw Club Leiden website (www.drawclubleiden.nl), but primarily in co-founding and managing a new international non-profit organization, the Network of Sustainable Development and Education, NSDE (www.nsdefoundation.org).
In every project we’ve worked on together since then and to this day, I have found Caspar to be an intelligent, highly capable and engaging academic, analyst and organizer who approaches each undertaking with passion and commitment. He consistently demonstrates thoroughness, punctuality and persistence, adapting well to dynamic, challenging work environments, such as a digital work culture so typical of people of a younger generation or the volatile start-up phase of a new organization intended to (eventually) operate on a global scale.
His creative insight, combined with his academic background, brings fresh perspectives and valuable contributions to every project – not just any we both are involved with, but also any that might catch his interest, involvement and passion in the future.
I first contacted Caspar ten Dam in May 2020, when as board-member of Association for the Study of EthnoGeoPolitics (EGP) and executive editor of its peer-reviewed journal Forum of EthnoGeoPolitics (see www.ethnogeopolitics.org), he invited me to join the journal’s editorial board for its Chinese-language section (and any submitted papers having to do with China). Since then I am helping through my experience as an Amazon kindle e-book author to get the first publications of EGP’s new publishing house EGxPress more widely available and distributed at Amazon and other outlets (see e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08LG7WMKT).
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I first met Caspar ten Dam during my exhibition My Romanians in the Lipsius building of Leiden University in November 2014 – one of my many exhibitions as a photo artist (www.fredrohde.nl). There, he immediately asked me to become an ‘in-house photographer’ for the annual Srebrenica commemoration in The Hague on the 11th of July, which I was happy to accept. Caspar had been actively involved in the annual Srebrenica commemoration for many years by the time I first met him, and ever since that fateful meeting, we’ve often worked together – not least during each 11th July between 2015 and 2018 when I took hundreds of photos on every 11th of July, making broad selections freely available to the co-organisers of the annual remembrance. We’ve also put together a photobook Srebrenica Commemoration & Marš Mira 2015 – 2018 (ISBN: 978-90-75568-34-9) in record time, and managed to sell quite a few copies already during the Srebrenica commemoration on 11 July 2019 (pdf-copies should become available by the beginning of 2020 on www.ethnogeopolitics.org).
During these occasions I’ve come to know Caspar as a warm and highly engaged person – the opposite of the aloof scholar residing in an ivory tower all the time (as I live in the university town of Leiden I know what I’m talking about). On the other hand, I’ve never seen him abandoning his scientific, critical faculties and abilities in the face of partisan or ideological considerations whenever he put his ‘political-activist’ hat on. He’s one of the very few persons I know who’s able and willing to separate and balance the activities and responsibilities of an activist and a scholar.