How do insurance products transform intimate and personal relations? What are the consequences of the classifications that insurance companies use and how do these affect solidarity, morality and inequality?

In recent years, and especially since the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, a growing body of research, media reporting, and scholarly literature has focused on the role of ‘Arab youth’ as the drivers of social and political movements across the Middle East and North Africa.

Professor at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria - South Africa

Ironies of Solidarity is an ethnographic study of how financial products and services affect inequalities and conflicts in South Africa.

Lecture, VVIK lecture

Unlike the predominant and excessive focus on the problems of food production and food insecurity in Africa, this project views African culinary tradition as a vibrant and rich cultural heritage, intertwined with language use.

Bachelor, Master

Inequality and violence are the two biggest issues in South Africa. What is the underlying cause? Could they be linked to rivalling groups, economic factors, government policy or all of the above? To understand social issues, it is important to study them within their context. The extended case study…

Study information

Study information

The Laiseang archiving project ensures the preservation of unique records of languages in the region which have been gathered by more than two dozen linguists at, and in collaboration with Dutch universities over the last 40 years.

This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective.

At the end of March, the first coronavirus infections were detected in southern Africa, which resulted in country after country rapidly closing their borders. Tycho van der Hoog witnessed this process at first hand during his PhD research in Namibia. He analyzes the state of the corona crisis from his…

Baleseng Maeneche (University of the Western Cape) has won the Africa Thesis Award 2024 with a master's thesis on media representation of male perpetrators of violence against women and children in South Africa. Her research challenges dominant narratives and emphasises the need for fair media representation…

Van Vollenhoven Lecture 2025

COUNTERRR examines domestic responses to jihadist armed groups in Africa, analyzing variation in state repression, community resistance, and the evolution of security across Mali, Nigeria, and Mozambique.

Archaeologist Dr Gerrit Dusseldorp's research project was covered by a South African newspaper. Dusseldorp and his team investigate the evolution of human behaviour through artefacts dug up in South African caves.

The Khoesan were the first people in Africa to undergo the full rigours of European colonisation. By the early nineteenth century, they had largely been brought under colonial rule, dispossessed of their land and stock, and forced to work as labourers for farmers of European descent.

Research how ‘custom’, ‘traditions’ and ‘heritages’ take on new meanings in the uplands of South and (mainland) Southeast Asia.

This project aims at describing the Khoisan languages !Ora (Korana/Griqua) and !Ui of South Africa.

This study seeks to partially fill the knowledge gap about national culture in Africa, basing its research on data on ethnolinguistic groups (instead of administrative regions).

South African professor Lungisile Ntsebeza will receive an honorary doctorate on the Foundation Day of Leiden University on Friday 7 February. Ntsebeza is an authority in the democratisation of rural South Africa and poverty reduction.

This book is about the workings of networks of the mobile in Africa, a continent usually associated with the ‘global shadows’ of the world.

This book explores how changes in the patterns of cooperation and conflict among states, regional actors and transnational non-state actors have affected the rise of emerging global powers and the suggested decline of US leadership. Scholars, students and policy practitioners who are interested in the…

On 8 February 2021 Leiden University celebrated its 446th anniversary.

In this book, Vanessa Newby provides the first detailed examination of credibility’s essential place in peacekeeping.

Lecture, Lunch Research Seminar

While African ground-based air quality measurements have struggled to gain national and continental footholds, satellite data, especially high-resolution measurements from the TROPOMI satellite, can provide not only continental coverage but lend new insights for regional to city-scale air quality issues…

The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide.

Taught from primary school to the university level – where new courses on the globalization of the Arabic writing system have cropped up (Abdallah 2014) – the Arabic script, with all its orthographic peculiarities and multiple facets, continues to shape languages other than Arabic, their communities…

The VVI seeks to develop and disseminate socio-legal knowledge and theory regarding the interaction between law, governance and society. More specifically, the Institute studies the emergence, functioning, and evolution of legal institutions.

What categories exist in the languages of pastoralists? Do these semantic concepts reflect universal or languagespecific tendencies? What (environment? culture?) governs the similarities (or the differences) attested crosslinguistically in cattle colour systems?

As part of the Paris Agreement, countries across the world agreed to support developing countries to invest in climate mitigation and adaptation through a Green Climate Fund. However, developed countries have failed to meet funding commitments for the Green Climate Fund–the flagship program financing…

This project examines the notion of sacred fertility and sacred landscapes, associated rituals and material culture, both archaeological and ethnographic manifestations in the Horn of Africa.

Procedural administrative law in a constitutional comparative law perspective

Two MEPs visited Leiden University on Friday 30 January. Their visit underscored the vital importance of the university’s expertise on Africa, Asia and Latin America in a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape.

Amazing discoveries by Jean Jacques Hublin of Early modern Humans in Morocco.

Promotores: G.R. de Snoo, B. Sinsin, Co-Promotor: H.H. de Iongh

Combining approaches from intellectual history, philology and the study of Arabic manuscripts, this study places the Bornu scholar Muḥammad al-Wālī within his intellectual environment on the one hand, and it portrays him as someone who responded to the concerns of ordinary Muslims around him on the…

Social science research helps us understand human behaviour and social structures. These are determined by various factors, which makes the research complex and increases the likelihood of drawing the wrong conclusions. The choice of research method and analysis is therefore extremely important. It…

On 25 January 2024 H.J. Pak successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This book questions the accepted origins of the field of International Relations (IR). Commonly understood to have emerged from the horrors of WW1 with the goal of bringing about world peace, the authors argue that on the contrary, IR came from a somewhat less noble tradition – that of the Round Tab…