Every month a member of the Institute for History tells about a book that inspired him or her. Afterwards, the pen is passed on to another colleague. This month dr. Meike de Goede tells about the book 'Between Tides' by Valentin Mudimbe. The novel, little known beyond the circles of Africanists and…

This summer school is for graduate (MA and PhD) students and researchers who have an interest in handwritten materials, editing, and the tradition of editing in the Muslim world. It offers theoretical lectures as well as hands-on practice with samples from the world-famous collections of the Leiden…

Having encountered a series of shocks that pose an existential threat to our livelihoods, our societies have become increasingly polarized.

Study all aspects of human life in the past and take on a broad, historic perspective.

Opportunities to join the initiative as a guest researcher and spend time in residence with GTGC in The Hague are available. If you are interested, we welcome you to contact us. Below you can find our current and former guest researchers.

Central to Nuranisa’s PhD project is the cultural diplomacy practiced by the Javanese courts of central Java (Surakarta, Yogyakarta, Pakualaman and Mangkunegaran) in response to the increasing Dutch colonial power in the 19th and early 20th century. The Javanese sultanates were incorporated into the…

Philology and Manuscripts from the Muslim World

The Hague Diplomacy Blog is the new monthly blog of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy (HJD), the ISGA-based research journal for the study of diplomacy.

In every parliamentary system, people vote on political parties during an election instead of a president. It is very unlikely that one party gets the majority of the parliament. Therefore, a government is formed by negotiations between parties. In Belgium, this process is far more complicated than…

Prof.dr. Annelou van Gijn has obtained a Marie Curie subsidy for research on wetland activity patterns in Mesolithic Northwest Europe. This funding has been used to employ the researcher dr. Aimée Little. The project will commence in November 2011.

On Friday 25 November 2016 the daughter of Professor Cleveringa, Mrs Ten Kate-Cleveringa, presented Leiden Law School with a magnificent bronze bust sculpture of her father.

Dr. Ahmad Al-Jallad and Prof.dr. Peter Akkermans have been awarded with the NWO Free Competition Grant for their research project 'Landscapes of Survival: Pastoralist Societies, Rock Art and Literacy in Jordan's Black Desert, c. 1000 BC to 500 AD'. Together, they study settlements, burials and inscr…

Elina Zorina presented her work-in-progress on “Distinctiveness in the Parliamentary Arena: Consequences for Vote Choice” during the GTGC lunch seminar on the 1st of May. Please find the abstract below:

On 4 September, Eva Grosfeld and Armin Cuyvers presented at the UACES Annual Conference in Belfast in a Themed Track on empirical approaches to the rule of law. Their contribution to the panel focused on the approach of the Court of Justice to the rule of law and how this approach affects citizens’…

A manifest was signed in France this week on gender neutral displays in toy stores, in the hope of preventing stereotypes and gender based prejudices. Minister van Engelshoven was rather taken with this French idea and called on toy manufacturers to evaluate their current toy collections. Which evoked…

For the second time in six months, Hans-Martien ten Napel has been invited to write the opening essay for a series of international blog posts.

Daan Weggemans, researcher at the Institute for Security and Global Affairs, discusses in the morning podcast of NU.nl whether the Netherlands is able to judge and guide the return of Syrian mothers and children.

Charles wrote an article 'Assimilating Afro Caribbean Carnivalesque Culture' for the publication 'Understanding América. The essential contribution of Afro-American music to the sociocultural meaning of the continent'

With this grant the researchers seek to shed light on the factors which play a role in transmitting jihadist ideas, and explore possible ways to mitigate this transmission.

What should policymakers and politicians do to prevent violent extremism? What are the greatest risks posed by the radical left and right? How do ideological media publications that terrorists assemble before attacks, may help to counter extremist narratives? About 30 professionals from all over the…

For a certain period the municipality of The Hague collaborated with the Salafist Quba mosque. The reason for the collaboration was to keep an eye on for radicalised youngsters. But as the collaboration progressed, the mosque became a breeding ground for Jihadists.

Religious minorities and their languages in the emerging nation states of the Middle East (1920–1950)

Global Interactions sponsors a number of research projects of Leiden University researchers.

Security in the broadest sense of the word was the key focus in the Interfaculty Conference on 4 April in Leiden. With almost 200 attendees and such well-known speakers as Dick Schoof, Pieter van Vollenhoven and Ad Verbrugge, the first conference was a success.

‘We want to say something very different from the norm. We are the radicals now.’ Tahir Abbas is lyric about the DRIVE project he will be leading from Leiden University in The Hague. This is a short introduction to the research that will be carried out in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and the United…

Contrary to what one might expect, societal actors influence China’s foreign policy. PhD candidate Sabine Mokry investigated how Chinese academics and think tanks impact the authoritarian leadership’s views on what constitutes the country’s national interest in the international arena. On 14 November…

Violent conflicts all over the world pose a great threat. Not only to the region’s inhabitants, but also to the cultural heritage in the area. This is the subject of the Europe Lecture in The Hague on 13 June.

Populist parties in national parliaments have a different style of working from their colleagues in other parties. They often vote against Cabinet proposals, but do not ask more questions about Cabinet activities. This is the finding of Leiden research in different European countries.

The ongoing conflicts between the United States and its allies and Russia and between the United States and its allies and China reflect both the anarchical nature of the international system and the uncertainty with which decision-makers and diplomats have to deal with in attempting to solve the conflicts…

In 2018, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) is celebrating its 100-year existence. To commemorate this occasion, policy historian Pieter Slaman conducted a comprehensive survey of the ministry. We now look back on 5 crucial moments.

Jelle van Buuren, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, appeared in Dutch newspapers the Algemeen Dagblad and Het Parool to discuss conspiracy thinking and the pandemic.

How do people become involved in terrorist organisations? Liesbeth van der Heide sought the answer to this question in a Malian prison, where she interviewed terrorists in a tiny cell. She discovered that the will to survive and social context are often more decisive than individual ideological convictions.…

The world’s attention will shift to China as the Communist Party is set to hold its five-yearly congress beginning on 16 October. We talk to Senior University Lecturer Florian Schneider about how its leader Xi Jinping is expected to cement his place as the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Ze…

Researchers from the Institute of Public Administration and the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at FGGA are launching a new research programme: Governing Polarized Societies (GPS). The programme will focus on the way in which governments are dealing with the increasing polarisation in society.…

Jan de Vetten brengt zijn promotieonderzoek ook uit in boekvorm. ‘In de ban van goed en fout’ beschrijft voor het eerst - op basis van archiefonderzoek en interviews - op samenhangende wijze de bestrijding van de CP en CD, en ook de reactie daarop van die partijen. Waarom werden ze zo fel werden bestreden?…

The state, and specifically the idea of nationality, is almost all-determining in social life in the Netherlands. It determines how people identify, how we interact with each other, and what (in)equality in society looks like. However, ultimately, the idea that we can divide people into different nationalities…

Three new ministries have been formed in the Netherlands: Asylum and Migration, Housing and Spatial Planning & Climate and Green Growth. Of course, this is not merely an administrative act. These ministries carry a strong and political charge and play a crucial role in shaping a government's political…

In many Central and Eastern European countries, a period of greater openness emerged in the late 1980s. How did this affect the future perspective of residents? And can we learn anything from this period for our current times? University lecturer Dorine Schellens delves into the literature to investigate…

On Tuesday 26 May 2020 professor H.U.E. (Bonno) Thoden van Velzen passed away.

Reports from Quebec media show the French-Canadian far-right organisation La Meute dealt itself another self-inflicted blow this week, with several club executives being forced out of the group and having a former co-founder, Patrick Beaudry, publicly declare ‘the ship is sinking.’

A team led by Dr. Yannick Veilleux-Lepage (Institute of Security and Global Affairs) and Joris Larik (Leiden University College The Hague) have secured research funding from the Canadian Department of National Defence and Canadian Armed Forces funded RWE-CAF Research Network.

Interested in what drives your colleagues to become a member of OSCL? And how they apply Open Science in their work? Below we interview OSCL member Ruthie Pliskin (from Social, Economic and Organisational Psychology).

Wouter Linmans is working on a PhD thesis on visions and fears of future warfare in Dutch society (1918-1939).

Earlier this year, the Cornelius Haga Lyceum, an Islamic secondary school in Amsterdam, received a lot of media attention. The Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) published an alarming official notice that caused quite a stir. Earlier today, the content of a report written by the…

Philosophical pragmatism has found more and more applications. But thus far it has not been applied to political crisis management. Political scientist Martin Bartenberger linked these two together and discovered that pragmatism, or the lack thereof, can help to explain how governments and public agencies…

The Minister of Education, Culture, and Science Ingrid van Engelshoven revealed on Thursday 13 June 2019 which projects will receive funding from the Students-4-Students Campaign. She made the announcement at Pulchri Studio in The Hague. Leiden University College The Hague was one of the seven educational…

Anaïs Van Ertvelde is a PhD candidate at the Leiden Institute for History. She is working on a thesis that investigates the cross-Iron Curtain impact of the UN International Year of Disabled Persons (1981).

As a result of two attacks in Germany and one attack in France within only one week, fears of new terrorist attacks in Europe have reignited. In France a radicalised police agent stabbed and killed four people. In Germany a man from Syria drove his car into a line of cars wounding sixteen people and…

Maria Boletsi has received a fellowship from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) within the framework of the Theme Group Project The Politics of (De)familiarization: The Common and the Strange in Contemporary Europe.