This book explores the lasting legacy of the controversial project by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded by the CIA, to promote Western culture and liberal values in the battle of ideas with global Communism during the Cold War.

Colonial Soldiers in Europe, 1914-1945:

In 1940 the Germany occupiers ordered the dismissal of all Jewish staff of the university. This resulted in protest speeches by fellow academics.

Everyone knows smoking is unhealthy, but did you also know that smoking is not good for the environment? In parternship with UFB, we are organising a number of action days to pick up cigarette butts, hand out sustainable ashtrays and inform people about how they can smoke more sustainably!

Despite the wealth of historical literature on the Second World War, the subject of religion and churches in occupied Europe has been undervalued.

Jelena Vićić and Richard Harknett offer an analytical construct to better understand the mechanism by which cyber-enabled influence operations work

Studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the Centenary of Snouck Hurgronje's

This book provides an exploration into the historical transformations of women's interactions with state police in the Western world from 1800 to 1950.

The territories that would make up what is today the Republic of Zambia officially became British in 1891. However, this did not equate to an on-the-ground presence of colonial authority capable of affecting the destiny and daily lives of people.

From 2012 onwards the primary scholarly and media focus in regard to foreign fighters has been on the large number of Westerners joining jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq. Yet, much less attention has been paid to another conflict in the ring around Europe that attracted foreign fighters: the Russo-Ukrainian…

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

This reflection for Critical Studies on Terrorism, explores two decades of the 'War of Terror' and what it means today.

The research group War, Peace and Justice brings together scholars, researchers as well as current and former practitioners to explore issues related to the drivers, nature and (new) dynamics of war and conflict, comprehensive approaches to the promotion of sustainable peace, and the role of justice…

How was anti-communism organized in the West? New volume edited by Giles Scott-Smith, Luc van Dongen and Stephanie Roulin on the aims, arguments and associations of a range of transnational anti-communist activists during the Cold War.

- Case study of the Hungarian Archaeological Mission in Abdallah Nirqi in 1964 –

The historiography of the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 is dominated by the personal clash between the principal negotiators, Harry Dexter White of the United States and John Maynard Keynes of Britain.

This dissertation describes the history of the Ottoman county of Foçateyn as a case study of the process of transition from the Ottoman Empire to nation states.

Leiden University commemorates its victims of the war and pays tribute to all members of the university community who resisted injustice. Rudolph Cleveringa, for instance, the dean of the law faculty who gave a protest speech in 1940 after his Jewish colleagues were fired. We honour their memory through…

This thesis seeks to examine the emergence of Persian novels and short stories during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).

This book offers novel perspectives on the national and international dimensions of the post-war welfare state in Western Europe and North America.

States, we are told, have monopolized the legal right to wage war since the seventeenth century and this arrangement has provided some basic stability in international relations. But is this really true? This project challenges this classic account and opens the way for rethinking the contemporary laws…

Cigdem Oguz defended her thesis on 13 June 2018

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

Why does the past elicit this intense activity in the present? What does the past mean for the present, and what does it do to it? A WAR OF WORDS will engage this complex of Chinese claims to Manchu-Korean ancient history, South Korean reactions, public discourse and cultural expression in both states,…

A new special issue on translation and the cultural Cold War sheds light on the understudied and yet important role of translation in cultural transfer.

How do first-hand narratives of war of commanders in the front line relate to the official narrative of the Eighty Years’ War?

Archives were a common target during the Second World War, and hundreds suffered damages. Among these archival losses, the losses to medieval manuscript collections stand out.

Acquiring and maintaining public support is frequently cited as an important requirement for governments fighting non-state actors. But how exactly can public support influence the course of counterterrorism campaigns and thereby contribute to an escalation or de-escalation of violence?

This book traces the emergence of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) from 1955 to 1963 amid the broader reshaping of the institutional architecture of post-war Europe. It considers the ill-fated Free Trade Area (FTA) proposal, the subsequent creation of EFTA, and the resulting division of Western…

In this article, Dimiter Toshkov investigates the determinants of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and refusal, focusing on Eastern, Southern and Western Europe.

In this article, Jeanine de Roy van Zuijdewijn and Edwin Bakker provide a big picture reflection on two decades after 9/11 in Western Europe.

How was the future United Nations Organization promoted to global publics during WW II?

On 10 May 1940, the Netherlands was taken completely by surprise by the attack of the German army. Wasn’t it? In his dissertation, Wouter Linmans debunks the idea that the Second World War took the Netherlands by surprise. ‘From 1935 onwards, all major political parties wanted to invest in the military.’…

Subproject of

Holocaust scholars Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski will jointly hold the Cleveringa lecture on November 26. They were accused of defamation in Poland for a book they co-edited. How has this affected them? ‘This is an attempt to wear us down.’

The objectives of the 2011 campaign Tell Balata Archaeological Park are to carry out excavations, promotion and awareness, community involvement, gathering oral histories and educating children. The objectives are described in a handout produced for the opening ceremony on June 21st 2011.

Two Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) have been placed in front of the University Library in memory of the Jewish Cosman family. At the time of the Second World War, they lived in one of the houses where the library is now located.

On 4 May, Leiden University remembered the victims of the Second World War from our university community. Alumni, students and present and former staff of the University came together for this Hour of Remembrance.

On 1 June 2022, Bruno Braak defended his thesis entitled 'Overcoming ruptures: Zande identity, governance, and tradition during cycles of war and displacement in South Sudan and Uganda (2014-2019).' The doctoral research was supervised by Prof.dr. J.M. Otto, Dr.ir. C.I.M. Jacobs, and Dr. C. Leonardi…

This master’s programme combines advanced levels of philosophical analysis with the study of non-Western sources, in particular, Chinese, Indian, and Arabic sources.

Herta Mohr was a promising Egyptologist who died in Bergen-Belsen. Lawyer Amandus Wolfsbergen died in Auschwitz, without knowing that the his work would continue to be a respected authority for many years. Thanks to research by PhD candidate Adriënne Baars, some more personal information has been added…

Leiden researcher Ethan Mark has a mission, he explains in the alumni magazine Leidraad. He wants us to take off our Eurocentric glasses when we study the Second World War. We have focused on ourselves for far too long; after 75 years, it’s about time we listened to stories from the rest of the worl…

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

Stories of resistance in the Second World War are widely covered in Dutch historiography: Hannie Schaft, Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, and Professor Cleveringa are some of the best known. But these accounts largely focus on the Dutch domestic perspective. On the other side of the world, a complex colonial…

Jacques Waisvisz (98) is one of our oldest living alumni. As a Jewish student in the Second World War, he was forbidden from completing his studies. How does he look back at that time, and what was life like afterwards? ‘No one thought that the situation here would become so bad.’

Exchanges between different cultures and institutions of learning have taken place for centuries, but it was only in the twentieth century that such efforts evolved into formal programs that received focused attention from nation-states, empires and international organizations.

Studying change in the course of human history, in different places, through the lens of a diverse set of core themes; World History for International Studies offers readers a set of windows into different debates historians have been conducting.

What does it mean to eat healthily and responsibly? This question is gaining a new urgency now that in many countries undernourishment is being overtaken by diseases of affluence, such as obesity, and we are also becoming more aware of the environmental impact of our eating habits. It’s time to take…