This network brings together colleagues from across the Institute for History whose work relates to the field of Political History broadly defined. Our research network builds consciously on the Leiden tradition of studying political culture and national identities, while moving beyond the historical boundaries of these themes.

1. Moving Beyond the Cultural Turn
The cultural turn enriched political history with new attention to symbolism, discourse, and identity formation. Although it perhaps also slightly diverted the discipline by shifting the focus away from formal institutions. Our network seeks a renewed synthesis between the classical political domain and the broader world of political meanings. This balanced approach honours the strengths of the cultural turn while addressing blind spots it left behind in local, rural and transnational arenas. Another result of the cultural turn is that it questioned classical boundaries of periodisation. This network therefore brings together colleagues working on different time periods who share an interest in the study of power.

2. Decolonising political history
Today, political history must be global in both scope and methodology. Decolonising political history requires us to question inherited historiographical hierarchies, to integrate political experiences from the Global South, and to include formerly marginalised archives and actors into our analysis. Our network expands the comparative lens of earlier Leiden traditions to a global field, where political institutions, cultural transfer and political identities are studied as interconnected phenomena across regions.

 3. Incorporating digital methods
The potential political world to study seems to be ever-expanding, based on the growing availability of digitised (e.g. parliamentary) corpora, tools for network analysis and digital mapping. But where do these methods leave the thick-description championed by the cultural turn in political history? Our network aims to address that dilemma throughout its activities.

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