The EU-IANUS researcher Martijn Vlaskamp obtained this last December the PhD in International Relations and European Integration with ‘summa cum laude’ at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). His PhD thesis, supervised by Esther Barbé (IBEI-UAB), had the title of ‘The European Union and its policies to curtail the trade in natural resources that fund armed conflicts’.
Particularly, in his PhD thesis Martijn Vlaskamp analyzed the policies of the EU with respect to natural resources that fund armed conflicts. He asked why the EU had chosen different approaches for apparently similar cases. To answer this question he developed an analytical framework that combined internal and external explanations and studied the cases of diamonds, timber and minerals.
As part of his research he was a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge (2012) and the Belgian Royal Institute for International Relations EGMONT (2013). Martijn got his bachelor in Public Administration from the University of Twente (The Netherlands) and holds two master degrees in European Studies from the Universities of Twente and Münster (Germany).