Black Theatre, activist theatre by and for black South Africans, flourished under apartheid. However, according to Francis Rangoajane, the democratisation of South Africa has in no way diminished the importance of this art form. PhD defence 16 November.

This project aims to provide evidence-based knowledge on the conditions for successful anti-corruption activism in Ukraine.

The Robben Island field school in January and February 2011 investigated and documented the tangible and intangible heritage of Robben Island, encompassing the remains associated with various political prisoners, the Muslim exiles, the lepers and lunatics, the WWII soldiers and Navy personnel, the prison…

Covid-19 has transformed Africa Knows! into a unique international knowledge-sharing event: it will now be a three-month online event instead of a physical conference lasting just a few days. Senior lecturer and co-organiser David Ehrhardt is eager to find out how successful this format will be. The…

Check the application deadlines for the MSc Political Theory: Legitimacy and Justice at Leiden University — visa / residence permit and non‑visa deadlines for September and February intakes.

Note: The Politics of Artificial Intelligence (MSc) application deadlines at Leiden University are 1 April for students requiring a visa, and 15 May for others.

Book by Soledad Valdivia Rivera

This book compares the policies of Australia and Italy towards boat people who have arrived in the two countries since the early 1990s.

The new book by Dimiter Toshkov - associate professor of Public Administration at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs - has been recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.

A fair distribution of goods and services is the most important factor in justifying political power. This is the conclusion of Honorata Mazepus in her PhD dissertation 'What makes authorities legitimate in the eyes of citizens?' PhD defence September.

WORLDING AMERICA researches how ‘play’ has been a key force in the past and present process of creating America as a coherent and hegemonic ‘world,’ from 1503 to the present.

What was the environmental impact of the industrial mining revolution that transformed southern Africa? Specifically, what was the impact of industrial mining when viewed from a more than human multi-species perspective?

Describing almost 1400 maps of Africa in three months. It’s no small task that student assistants Artemis Mantheakis and Beatriz Veiga have been working on within the joint ASCL-UBL Africa Maps Project. The project’s aim is to describe and catalogue a 20th-century map collection of the library of the…

Lions in West and Central Africa form a unique group, only distantly related to lions in East and Southern Africa. Biologists at Leiden University confirm this in an article published in Scientific Reports.

This month's news and events by the profile area Political Legitimacy features the announcement of two PhD defences and several interesting seminars and conferences at Leiden University.

Every time we pay for something, our money moves through global technical systems that connect the world economy. These systems are convenient, but they also expose users to Western sanctions, prompting countries like Russia to look for alternative financial infrastructure.

This subproject offers a political and transnational perspective on the development and uses of public memories of the Revolt in the seventeenth century.

The production of history is a process of power. This is particularly relevant in Africa, where during both the colonial and the post-colonial era history has been written by hegemonic regimes. This historiography has in turn (re-)produced structures of domination, social exclusion and division.…

Kohei Suzuki is Assistant Professor at Institute of Public Administration. This study carries several important implications for understanding the policy impacts of a graying population and for studies of the welfare state, in general.

On 30 January 2024 Jurre van der Meer successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Irna Hofman defended her thesis on 10 January 2019.

In September, the Una Europa ELSEA project, Enhancing Scholarship in Eastern Africa, officially started. Now that the project has been running for a couple of months, it’s high time to check in and see how the project is going.

This research deals with the royal houses of the Vijayanagara Empire and four of its successor states: Ikkeri, Tanjavur (under both the Nayaka and Bhonsle rulers), Madurai, and Ramnad. This study is thus concerned with dynastic politics and imperial legacies in south India between the 14th and 18th…

This book is the first systematic analysis of the changes in the use of goods and services by households of Black South Africans since the early nineteenth century.

In my research I am concerned with the possibility of a politics of sexuality without reverting to identitarian conceptions of sexuality. In a reading of the work of the American author James Purdy, I propose to move towards a politicizing of the concept of narrative identity as developed by the French…

James Shires has contributed a chapter to the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Cyber Conflict (CyCon 2021), which gathers 20 articles from the law, technology and strategy domains.

On 24 September 2020, Bernardo Ribeiro de Almeida defended his thesis 'Building land tenure systems: the political, legal, and institutional struggles of Timor-Leste'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. A.W. Bedner. Co-supervisor was Dr. C.I.M. Jacobs.

In this research note, Van der Does & Kantorowicz aruge that citizens that tend to experience political exclusion are often more supportive of direct and participatory forms of decision-making.

EU foreign policy has become increasingly politicised over the past years, amongst others as a consequence of the succession of crises. Crises may engender processes of crisis framing and contestation. This article focuses on how the policy demands being voiced in these processes of contestation are…

This interdisciplinary study focuses on (trans)national ethnic and popular networks, combining historical-ethnographic and computational methods to understand the ‘workings’ of networked conflict interfering in the increasingly violent conflict in the Sahel (Africa) and beyond. The project focuses on…

It is a full classroom: more than 30 pupils from 5 and 6 vwo are present to listen to political scientist Leila Demarest's lecture. She gives a brief introduction on the topic she is about to discuss: democracy in the global North and South. At first, the group seems a bit quiet, but when she asks questions…

Within the scope of innovating and connecting – the theme of our new Strategic Plan – I paid a visit to Brussels last week. It is important to give Leiden University a face in Brussels and to show our expertise, on Africa for instance.

On 12 April 2022 Alok Oak successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

On 22 August, the GO-FAIR IN Africa was launched: an implementation network under the GO FAIR efforts to train, build and change the next generation of the Internet of FAIR Data and Services (IFDS).

View the tuition fee details for the MSc The Politics of Artificial Intelligence at Leiden University: statutory rates for EU/EEA applicants and institutional fees for non‑EU students.

View tuition fee information for the MSc Political Theory: Legitimacy and Justice at Leiden University, including how fees vary by nationality, residency status and programme category.

Leila Demarest, Assistant Professor of African Politics at Leiden University, has recently been awarded with a Leiden University Fund research grant to study adolescents’ political attitudes and inter-group tolerance in Lagos, Nigeria.

In this project we ask: how does pollution manifest as part of different practices, both socially and materially.

Africa has a population of 1.5 billion. In 30 years’ time, this will be 2.5 billion. The continent’s impact on the global economy, but also on the environment, will therefore increase drastically. Researchers from the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) have been aware for decades of the crucial role…

What is the role of local authorities and communities in shaping how inter-Schengen borders are understood and dealt with?