On Monday, April 24 the Austria Centre Leiden and the Leiden Jewish Studies Association hosted a special seminar with Prof. Edyta Gawron entitled “Politics and the Holocaust in Modern Poland.” Gawron is a historian and professor of Jewish Studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków and a noted expert…

On 18 October, Armin Cuyvers, Associate Professor of European Law at the Europa Instituut, spoke at the Law School of Sydney University on reconciling political drama and legal realities in Brexit.

As both old and new democracies experience increasing democratic backsliding, there is a critical societal need to rethink the design and effectiveness of democratic checks and balances. In this conference on Friday 9 June, the aim is to explore multidisciplinary insights about what makes the checks…

On Friday, April 5, the Ecuadorian police stormed the Mexican Embassy in Quito to arrest former Ecuadorian vice president Jorge Glas Espinel.

The Team International Relations and European Studies addresses the interconnections and interdependence of contemporary global political, economic, security and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective rooted in the humanities. More specifically it is concerned with the study of international relations…

Atrocities have been the order of the day in Syria since war broke out in 2011, but the perpetrators are rarely tried. According to PhD candidate Elizabeth Van Schaack, the international community could bring justice in Syria, but only if there is political will. PhD defence on 29 April 2020.

The past decade, against the backdrop of a fragmented political landscape, has witnessed the greatest changes to the Netherlands since the aftermath of the Second World War. The labour market, the housing market, the energy market, the bank system, the pension system, the healthcare system, to name…

Assistant Professor Briitta van Staalduinen has received the Best Dissertation Award from the American Political Science Association, Section on Class and Inequality. Her dissertation, Ethnic Inequality in the Welfare State, aims to reconcile the persistence of ethnic inequalities in expansive welfare…

On Friday 3rd February 2017 Leiden University hosted a PhD colloquium in conjunction with the University of Liverpool and the University of Oslo, on the topic of ‘Law and Politics in the European Union’. As part of the Interaction between Legal Systems 2.0 project, the colloquium presentations focused…

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.

Managing scarcity to serve the public interest is a classic government task. An important way to execute this task is by allocating individual rights that are only available in limited quantities, such as CO2 emission allowances, gambling licences, subsidies, radio frequencies, public contracts and…

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

Postdoc and linguist Evelyn Bosma receives the Keetje Hodshon Prize for her dissertation. For her research on the multilingualism of Frisian children, Bosma previously won the Klokhuis Science Prize and the Campus Fryslân Science Prize.

‘Dutch politics are changing, but they also are characterised by stability; that tension fascinates me.’ Sarah de Lange studies, among other things, the Dutch party system, and specifically how the rise of extremist parties influences democracy. She will start as a professor in Leiden in mid-October…

For every period, it is a challenge to unearth the details of political trafficking; yet the effort needs to include all relevant persons, groups, and institutions – not only those wielding formal responsibilities. We hope to reinvigorate this effort by inviting specialists to present their research…

Where does Europe begin and end? How have the European Union and its precursors decided which countries are eligible to join the community and which are not? Few issues are more hotly debated, more important for the course of European integration, or more consequential for individuals in and around…

Citizens, journalists and scholars notice that foreign policy in, and of, the European Union, is ‘de-Europeanising’. Political scientist Daniel Thomas (Leiden University) offers a theoretical exploration of the likely implications. He expects that it will become more difficult for the EU to achieve…

Why do some civil wars experience quagmire, a situation in which belligerents are trapped in fighting? To explain this puzzle, Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl (Leiden University Institute of Political Science) analyses the overlapping strategic interactions between foreign powers and the warring parties. Studying…

Tim Koopmans is one of the great minds in the history of Dutch and European legal scholarship. He taught law as a professor in Leiden and other universities, among which Ghent, Cambridge, Utrecht. He practiced it as a judge in the European Court of Justice and Advocate-General in the Dutch Supreme Court,…

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…

What does a 19th-century exhibition of traditional utensils from the province of Zeeland tell us about the current rise of populism? A lot, Ad Maas will say in his inaugural lecture.

Earlier this week, a working group of the United Nations, comprising all 193 of its member states, adopted a consensus report on norms for responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. Dennis Broeders, full professor of Global Security and Technology at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden…

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…

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…

In 2009-2010, the notion of a more ‘assertive’ China emerged in Western discourse, a viewpoint that China vehemently rejects. Nevertheless, especially after Xi Jinping rose to power in 2012, it is clear that China has abandoned its long-held foreign policy doctrine of ‘keeping a low profile.’

Tom Long (2022). A Small State’s Guide to Influence in World Politics. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780190926212, 240 pp. (hardback), £19.99.

Leiden University invites pre-applications from scholars who wish to spend 12-24 months in the Institute of Political Science as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship Programme.

The student loan system, implemented in 2015 in part to improve the quality of Dutch education, is facing political backlash. Despite having signed the student loan system agreement in 2015, both GroenLinks and PvdA have had a change of heart.

To be eligible for the GMD Legal Track LL.M. at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

From 1 September 2014, Glen Newey takes up the post of Professor of Practical Philosophy in Leiden University’s Institute for Philosophy.

From 1 to 2 June 2017 Leiden University hosts the annual 24-hour Political Science Conference (‘Politicologenetmaal’). This event will bring together political scientists and practitioners from Flanders and The Netherlands, who will participate in several workshops to discuss subjects like elections,…