The master’s programme in Colonial and Global History at Leiden University offers the most in-depth and comprehensive programme on the history of colonialism and globalisation currently available in Europe.

When it comes to languages and cultures, Leiden University is the university. The global expertise present places our university at the top. In Leiden and The Hague, we study languages and cultures from all regions of the world and from prehistory to the present day. In this way we create a broad view…

PhD defence

PhD defence

Sophie Vériter explores a small state’s impact on EU security governance, a hard challenge means against big states in this policy area.

Meet the people of the Resilience Center

In the Criminal Justice research programme, legal experts, criminal law experts and social scientists – many of whom are criminologists – collaborate on various projects. The research programme focuses on the content and form of decisions that are, can and may be taken in the criminal justice chain…

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…

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…

Nationalism is commonly regarded as posing a challenge to international stability and regional and global order more generally. Arguably, nationalism encourages narrowly defined and zero-sum security policies; it works against compromises and consensus; it undermines international trust and cooperation.…

At our regular panel discussions we bring together scholars and other experts to discuss a current topic that captures the interest of the general public as well as academics.

Aesthetic formations and cultural repertoires give meaning to our reality in ways that are never neutral. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its global interlocutors, this project brings together a team of scholars from Leiden University who bring in inter-disciplinary, inter-area…

Description of The Regional Network on the Synergy between the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

Bone research provides plenty of detailed data about the health of a person or a group. This data is not only used to reconstruct the past but also to fight disease today.

This seminal volume covers the entire global history of urbanization since the rise of cities in Mesopotamia in the 6th millennium BC. Leiden historians Wim Blockmans, Leonard Blussé, Luuk de Ligt and Leo Lucassen contributed survey and thematic chapters.

What is my contribution to the world? This is what students and researchers at Leiden University College The Hague (LUC) ask themselves every day. They want to make a difference with their teaching and research in the four global challenges of ‘Peace and Justice,’ ‘Sustainability,’ ‘Diversity’ and ‘…

SciSTIP was established on 1 April 2014 as part of the DSI-NRF Centres of Excellence Programme funded by the South Africa’s National Research Foundation (https://www.nrf.ac.za/). SciSTIP is hosted by the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University and…

Research on the global field of museums, heritage, commemoration, consumption and material culture

Morocco and the Netherlands have a strong bond. The modern community of Dutch people with Moroccan roots is part of a shared history spanning four centuries of social and academic exchange. As an institution that functions at the heart of Moroccan society and the university system, the Netherlands Institute…

Within the Global Ethnography specialisation, you can develop your own research project or make use of the research opportunities offered by our staff members listed below.

Leiden University offers ambitious students the latest knowledge and the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

Leiden University offers ambitious students a world-class environment in which to reach their full potential.

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.

The Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA) is pleased to introduce a new research seminar series. The FGGA Research Seminar will be a forum for the presentation and discussion of current, high-quality research on topics covered by the faculty.

Lecture, This Time for Africa! Series

On Monday 10 December, the Polish Commissioner for Human Rights dr. Adam Bodnar delivered the eighth Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture on Human Rights at Leiden Law School. The event marked the annual celebration of International Human Rights Day, which was proclaimed to commemorate…

The Ecuadorian Pachakutik party is one of the oldest indigenous political movements in Latin America. Despite not being very successful at the polls and hardly having organisational resources at its disposal, Pachakutik is still part of Ecuador’s political landscape. In her dissertation, Political Scientist…

In January 2014, the research project The Promise of Organization hosted a fruitful three-day conference:

Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery.

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, integrating debates about Roman urban space with discourse on Roman urban history.

Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie present a fresh look at the Dutch Atlantic in the period following the imperial moment of the seventeenth century. This epoch (1680–1815), the authors argue, marked a distinct and significant era in which Dutch military power declined and Dutch colonies began to chart…

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A Comparative Anthropology of Commercial Insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of China's global resurgence and its effects on U.S. dominance.

This book collates thematic reflections on Cameroon music exalting Manu Dibango, one of the first-generation Cameroonian musicians, who bowed to Covid-19 on 24 March 2020.

An experimental approach to organic palaeolithic technology

The remains of Dutch East India Company forts are scattered throughout littoral Asia and Africa. But how important were the specific characteristics of European bastion-trace fortifications to early modern European expansion?

Colonial and Global History combines a deep curiosity of transcultural processes such as imperialism, (de)colonization, and globalization with critical historical research on regional societies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Eschatology played a central role in both politics and society throughout the early modern period. It inspired people to strive for social and political change, including sometimes by violent means, and prompted in return strong reactions against their religious activism.

Current status and future prospects

Documenting and describing languages of the world.

This edited book presents case-studies and reflections on the role of languages and their analytic study in development practices across four regions: Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific.

Today, everybody and everything produces data. People produce large amounts of data in social networks and in commercial transactions. Medical, corporate, and government databases continue to grow. Sensors continue to get cheaper and are increasingly connected, creating an Internet of Things, and generating…

On 30 June 2016, Eesa Fredericks is expected to defend his Ph.D.-thesis ‘Contractual Capacity in Private International Law’ in Leiden. Supervisors are prof. Sierd J. Schaafsma (Leiden) and prof. Jan Neels (Johannesburg).

Descriptive linguistics at LUCL covers documentation and descriptive analysis of lesser-studied languages as well as typological and historical comparison.

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A Comparative Anthropology of Commercial Insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.