The English edition of Rijpkema’s Weerbare democratie is published in Routledge’s Extremism and Democracy series, one of the leading series in the field, edited by Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin.

Few details, relatively few words. The coalition agreement presented is one of the shortest in the past 20 years, Arco Timmermans knows. Consequently, the outlines were not negotiated for very long, which has its advantages and disadvantages. 'Over the next few weeks, we are mainly going to see the…

European integration is under pressure. At the same time, the notion of a European administrative space is being explicitly voiced. But does a shared idea of the public servant exist in Europe?

Human Rights at Risk brings together social scientists, legal scholars, and humanities scholars to analyze the policy challenges of human rights protection in the twenty-first century.

Debate

Peter Grol and Edwin Bakker, professor of Terrorism and Counterterrorism at the University, presented their book ‘Dutch Jihadists’ for a large audience. The book tells individual stories of jihadists in Holland and of Syria-goers and should contribute to a better insight into their backgrounds and m…

Inaugural lecture

Lecture, PCNI Research Seminar

Lecture, LIAS Lunch Talk Series

This study is an attempt to reconstruct the muted violent past by breaking the monopoly of the Turkish state over the memory of the Armenian genocide.

After an initial suggestion of a move toward Israel, India’s Prime Minister Modi has signaled a significant recalibration of his government’s engagement with the Middle East region. Now, India seems to be prioritising strong ties with the Gulf states.

Geert Wilders and his PVV party have won the 2023 elections. What was the deciding factor for this victory?

In the nineteenth century many Dutch people believed in the end of time and the coming of God's thousand-year reign. This belief effectively slowed down the process of modernisation that was taking place in the Netherlands at that time, concludes historian Rie Kielman. PhD defence 13 April.

Political scientist Wouter Veenendaal (Leiden University) has been awarded a Vidi grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This enables him to further develop his innovative line of research on and set up a research group in the coming five years. Veenendaal et al. will analyse the democratic consequences…

Leiden’s Institute for History has an exceptionally strong expertise in premodern European history in its global context, with specialists whose interests cover virtually the whole continent. We have a strong track record in leading larger research teams and work together with colleagues across Europe…

Lecture, INVISIHIST event

Festival

Festival

‘‘Stop focusing on the money and start creating a heart for Europe’’ This Friday, the 29th of April, Bernard Steunenberg and his co-authors will launch their book ‘Fit for the Future’. We spoke with him about issues presented in the book, the EU Presidency and why people should read the book.

There was a lot of fuss last week about the ‘dragnet law’, in which intelligence services are now authorised to conduct large-scale tapping of cable communications. The public image here is that the privacy of innocent citizens will almost certainly be violated. Paul Abels, professor of governance of…

This month Johan Christensen, assistant professor at the Institute of Public Administration, published his new book: ‘The Power of Economists within the State’. The book explores four countries, Denmark, Ireland, Norway and New Zealand and analyses why these similarly sized and wealthy countries have…

In the second and final round of the French elections this Sunday, the French will vote for who is going to become their next president. In an article for the Washington Post, Alexandre Afonso, assistant professor at Leiden University, has tried to project the votes in order to predict whether Marine…

This open access book explores the role of continuity in political processes and practices during the Age of Revolutions.

The Rutte IV cabinet is more or less complete. It includes more women than ever. For the first time ever, the Netherlands will have two ethnic minority ministers, and ministers without political experience but with plenty of professional expertise will also be making their debut. However, political…

The center studies the many ways in which issues of law and justice are dealt with in art and literature with a focus on liminal issues and cases. These are issues and cases where law comes to the limits of what it is capable of dealing with and art and literature explore the implications of what is…

Political scientist Tim Mickler (Leiden University) receives a grant from The Dutch Research Council (NWO) for his quantitative research into post-parliamentary positions of parliamentarians. The grant is a result of the SGW Open Competition XS, with the aim of stimulating innovative scientific rese…

PhD defence

Ideology and Christianity in Japan shows the major role played by Christian-related discourse in the formation of early-modern and modern Japanese political ideology.

Yuxi Nie defended her thesis on 15 October 2019.

Debate

The recent consecration of India’s Ayodhya temple by Prime Minister and Bharatiya Janata Party figurehead Narendra Modi raises important questions. Is secularism giving way to religious rule in the world’s largest democracy? How does this resonate with India’s culturally diverse population? France 24…

On Thursday 19 and Friday 20 September the PROSEPS conference took place in The Hague under the auspices of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs of Leiden University. During the two-day meet up, working group meetings and workshops took place in the New Babylon Conference Centre in the heart…

Lecture, PCNI Research Seminar

Wopke Hoekstra, outgoing Minister of Foreign Affairs visited Campus The Hague on 6 July to talk to students about the upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius.

Political philosopher Nicholas Vrousalis (Leiden University) has been awarded a EURIAS Fellowship at Aarhus University’s Institute for Advanced Study (AIAS). From from 1 October 2018 to 31 July 2019 Vrousalis will work at the Danish research institute on his project ‘Inequality against Freedom: Economic…

Where did the new generation of antislavery activists get their inspiration to organize in large-scale pressure groups?

Security seems to most people a basic necessity of life, a prerequisite for a good life. But if you think about it a little longer and deeper, as political philosopher Josette Daemen has done, you realise that security sometimes comes at the expense of other important goods, such as freedom and equality.…

Transparency is seen as an important value for democratic government policy. Does that mean that we should do away with state secrets, such as confidential information involving intelligence agencies and political deals made behind closed doors? Political philosopher and ERC grant recipient Dorota Mokrosinska…

Boyd Leupen has won the Institute of Political Science MSc Thesis Prize 2015. With 'Refuting asymmetrical Kantianism: On the moral standing of animals', Leupen completed his Political Science master studies and contributed an excellent piece of scholarly work. According to the jury, his thesis stands…

What Determines Perceptions of Bias toward the International Criminal Court? Evidence from Kenya. In this article, published on the website SAGE Journals in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the authors Geoff Dancy, Yvonne Marie Dutton, Tessa Alleblas, Eamon Aloyo examine the attitude towards international…

Employer organizations have been presented as strong promoters of the liberalization of industrial relations in Europe. This article, in contrast, argues that the preferences of employers vis-à-vis liberalization are heterogeneous and documents how employer organizations in Spain, Italy, and Portugal…

The Discovery of El Greco: The Nationalization of Culture Versus the Rise of Modern Art (1860-1915)

My current research focuses on criminality and gender interactions in nineteenth-century Europe. This project uses a comparative methodology to explain gender constructions in a criminal and in a court setting.

University lecturer Casper Wits wrote an opinion piece on the ongoing diplomatic tensions between the European Union and China for POLITICO. In this article, he argues that 'rather than shrinking from the fight, the EU must develop a China policy that prioritizes progressive values and human rights.…

The Rutte-III coalition agreement has been presented and the commentary is flooding in. Public administration experts Arco Timmermans and Gerard Breeman examined the new agreement – as they have done for every coalition agreement since 1963 - and made a systematic analysis of it: it is very much about…

Under what circumstances is politicization more likely to occur than others, and what impact does politicization have on government legitimacy and performance?

This research aims to investigate how different social forces interact with hydropolitics in the Eastern Nile Basin and what are the constraints of engagement.

This book is the first comparative study of estimative intelligence and strategic surprise in a European context, complementing and testing insights from previous studies centred on the United States. It does extensive empirical analysis of open-source material and interviews in relation to three cases…

The widespread idea that politics is mediatised needs to be revised. Although media attention heavily influences some political processes, this is not the case when it comes to lawmaking. Lotte Melenhorst, a political scientist at Leiden University, analysed three heavily covered legislative processes…