Bette Dam is a Dutch journalist. She lived in Afghanistan for four years, where she worked as a correspondent for NRC Handelsblad and Radio Netherlands Worldwide, among others. She is currently finishing a PHD looking to address and change the narratives of contemporary war journalism.
She also publishes in The Guardian and Vrij Nederland and is a sought-after Afghanistan expert in Dutch and international media and with various governments.
Her book Expeditie Uruzgan (Expedition Uruzgan) was published in 2009. In 2019, Op zoek naar de vijand was published. This book was also translated into English in 2021 under the title Looking for the Enemy: Mullah Omar and the Unknown Taliban and exposed deep structural gaps in international reporting on Afghanistan – research that she expands on in her PHD thesis at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel on the systematic underperformance of traditional media.
Since 2020, she has been teaching “Unthinking Afghanistan” at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) in Paris. She is also working on her doctorate.
With support from Columbia University's Tow Centre for Digital Journalism, Dam launched UNHEARD in 2025, a project and platform designed to reform journalism from within. UNHEARD combines practical experience, data-driven analysis and reflective newsroom tools to help media organisations tackle bias and create more inclusive and context-rich reporting.
