Tine Molendijk has long studied the human dimensions of military intervention. What are the fundamental dilemmas of war? What new ethical challenges arise with military innovation, from drones to digital influence? How have attitudes towards warfare and combat recently shifted, and what tensions follow? These are the kinds of questions she will address under her chair. As an anthropologist with an interdisciplinary orientation, she views human experience as embedded in broader contexts, such as political decision-making and public opinion. In her teaching she encourages students to think with an ‘empathetically critical’ mindset about violence and its causes.
The armed forces have always been, at their core, an organisation of violence. We should be honest about that.
About Tine Molendijk
Prof. Dr. Tine Molendijk began her academic career at the University of Amsterdam, where she obtained her bachelor's and master's degrees in Cultural and Social Anthropology. She continued her studies at Radboud University, where she obtained her PhD in 2020. Her PhD thesis, “Soldiers in Conflict: Moral Injury, Political Practices and Public Debates”, a work on moral injury among military personnel, won the 2021 Grote Van Helsdingen Prize for the best work at the intersection of psychiatry and philosophy.
After obtaining her PhD, she worked as a lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and as a researcher in the Clinical Genetics department at the VU Medical Centre. Here, she studied the increasing use of neurobiological material in forensic psychiatric reports. She also worked as a researcher at the Netherlands Defence Academy, where she focused on how military personnel are educated and trained in the areas of stress and ethics. In addition to her position as professor at Radboud University, she works at the Faculty of Military Sciences (FMW) of the Netherlands Defence Academy, where she is head of the Research Centre Military Management Studies.
In 2024 she was awarded the KNAW Early Career Award for exceptional talent in the behavioural sciences, recognising groundbreaking and original research. She has wide experience in securing research grants, leading projects, and supervising PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers. In 2018 she received a prestigious NWO/NWA grant for the transdisciplinary research project Moral injury in context.
In my teaching I aim to create ‘brave spaces’ where robust academic debate can thrive without pre-emptively excluding perspectives as off-limits.