Teun Voeten

Teun Voeten studied Cultural Anthropology and Philosophy in the Netherlands. He is an internationally acclaimed war reporter and photographer who has been covering the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Colombia, Rwanda, Liberia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, Honduras, DR Congo, Libya and Syria. His work has been published in Vanity Fair, Newsweek and National Geographic. Voeten also works for international organizations such as the ICRC and the UNHCR.

Voeten wrote books about the underground homeless in New York, the war in Sierra Leone and made a photo book on the drug violence in Mexico. Currently, he is writing a PhD dissertation on the same subject where he researches in what terms the drug war should be analysed: A criminal insurgency that exploits a weak state, or a hyper-hybrid form of warfare? He looks also in the motivations of the perpetrators of extreme violence.

As a war reporter, Voeten visited many different theatres of war. He was in Tel Aviv during Gulf War 1 and saw Saddam Hussein’s barrage of SCUD missiles. He witnessed the break up of Yugoslavia, was shot by a sniper in Mostar and covered extensively the siege of Sarajevo. Embedded with US troops in Afghanistan, he was ambushed several times by Taliban. In Colombia, he was taken at gunpoint from a bus by Marxist rebels. In Sierra Leone, he survived a death squad of drugged up child soldiers. In Rwanda, he was the only journalist present when the genocide started. Voeten combines first hand experiences in regular and irregular warfare with an academic background, offering fresh perspectives to analyze current conflicts. His special interest goes out to transnational crime, warlordism, terrorism, globalization, hybrid warfare and propaganda in an age of social media.