How did free agents oppose the monopolies held by the VOC and WIC in court?

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.

How did interests outside the scope of the Dutch chartered trading companies influence the career-paths of Dutch colonial governors?

This research projects wants to know what Muslims in the West do and mean by ‘Sharia’, and how the Western legal system responds to that. The focus is on Sharia as an informal practice by Muslims in the West, i.e. other than through state law or state courts.

Amerindian settlement patterns and early colonial cartography in Northern Hispaniola

Islam is often studied as a distinct and uniform phenomenon that is or should be kept private, and stands apart from any other human activity, be it in the field of economics, law or politics.

How has interreligious encounter in Ogbómòsó created multiple religious belongings and identities among individuals and groups?

The role of domestic and wild resource exploitation in Bronze Age subsistence

This book explores the intellectual and cultural flows between Asia and Europe which occurred during – and were formative of – the political and social changes of the first half of the twentieth century.

The Issues beneath the Surface

Facts, Fears and the Future of Islamic Rules on Family Relation in the West

What socio-cultural transformations did indigenous communities in the Lesser Antilles undergo from the late precolonial to the early colonial period in response to Amerindian­ European-African cultural encounters? How did Amerindian populations realign themselves in response to the colonisation…

Muslims have lived in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe for centuries. Their arrival in Western Europe, the two Americas and Australia is however relatively recent. Studying how Muslims relate to their Western environment (and vice versa) and the mutual influences of Western and Islamic philosophies…

Conference, Workshop

The Lucas Andreas complex in Amsterdam West is a residential complex which contains privately-owned apartments, social housing, and also harbours a few offices and health care institutes. As a result, the complex has a very rich diversity of residents and users. Recently, the Home Owners Association…

Provides a cutting-edge comparative political economy analysis of welfare and inequality across ten East Asian countries.

The Dutch and English East India Companies were formidable organizations that were gifted with expansive powers that allowed them to conduct diplomacy, wage war and seize territorial possessions. But they did not move into an empty arena in which they were free to deploy these powers without resista…

The main objective of this research is to map out the cities of the Roman Near East in the imperial period, with a focus on location, city size and urban features, in order to study the form the urban system and its levels of integration.

East European Politics is a refereed journal which publishes articles on the government, politics and international relations of the post-communist world.

The Center participates in East European Politics, one of the major political science journals focusing on the contemporary post-communist space.

Since 2017, NVIC offers an interdisciplinary semester in Middle East Studies for students of Dutch and Flemish universities, primarily in the fields of International Studies. Half the semester (15 ects) is devoted to Arabic language acquisition, both Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Colloquial…

What are the immediate and lasting effects of the colonial encounters on indigenous Caribbean cultures and societies and what were the intercultural dynamics that took place during the colonisation processes? How can the study of indigenous Caribbean histories contribute to a more sophisticated awareness…

The master’s in East Asian Studies, a specialisation within the master's of Asian Studies, combines an exceptional range of courses with advanced language training and outstanding resources and expertise.

An overview of Professional Associations and Journals

Promotores: H.A. Udo de Haes, H.H.T. Prins, Co-promotor: H.H. de Iongh

In the master’s programme in Archaeology, you can follow courses on the archaeology of the Near East, deepening your understanding of this region’s fascinating past.

The unique geographic and temporal breadth of research at Leiden allows us to stimulate a shift from the classical Weberian mode of scholarly production that views historical development and modernization as emanating from Europe and the West to a multi-polar perspective that allows for more nuanced,…

In this lecture professor Harding considered the implications of Asia's 21st-century rise for its legal systems and our approaches to studying them in the new situation we confront in the early 21st century.

Matthias Haentjens and Ross Spence participated in Warsaw conference and PhD workshop on 16 & 17 November 2018.

This project aims at investigating the multidirectional effects of forced and voluntary forms of migration in the ancient Near East.

Indonesian Law and Reality in the Mahakam Delta

The Near East, situated at the nexus of Europe, Africa, and Asia, was central to the development of ancient societies in all three continents.

In tracing the deeper historical roots of what Xi Jinping contemporarily frames as a “Chinese dream” of “wealth and power,” the article discerns key actors, events, and organizing principles in a long process toward restoring China’s deemed rightful place in the regional system.

How did free agents in the Dutch Republic react to the creation of colonial monopolies (VOC and WIC) by the States-General? This project answers this question by looking at the role individuals played in the construction of an informal global empire parallel to the institutional empire devised by the…

PNAS publication on protein encounter complexes

PhD Defence

Archaeobotanic research by prof. dr. C. Bakels and students on agriculture.

Published by Brill Nijhoff and written by leading experts including national judges, academics and practitioners East African Community Law is the first comparative as well as open access textbook on EAC law. The book provides a key resource for the research, teaching, and practice of EAC law. It also…

From the mid-19th century until the 1970’s, the Middle East witnessed the presence of various European missionaries who played a fundamental role in the birth and the development of humanitarianism. Since these Christian missionaries were well integrated in the local Middle Eastern societies via their…

After an initial suggestion of a move toward Israel, India’s Prime Minister Modi has signaled a significant recalibration of his government’s engagement with the Middle East region. Now, India seems to be prioritising strong ties with the Gulf states.

Special Issue in: Visual Anthropology, Volume 29, Issue 3, 2016

Chaider Bamualim defended his thesis on 9 September 2015

The project re-examines the role of the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox missionaries in the cultural and social developments of the Middle East and their interactions with the indigenous communities, from the nineteenth century until today. It seeks to discover and retrace such ‘entangled histories’…

Imagining the Americas in Print contains eleven essays, seven of which have been published before and four of which are new.

The main question of this research project concerns the extent to which light verbs in West Germanic languages participate in processes of language change.

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural…

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural…

The Central and Eastern European Studies Centre is an interdisciplinary platform of scholars of Leiden University. The Centre’s mission is to bundle together, strengthen and disseminate existing research into the history, politics, and culture of the region, spanning the new member states of the EU,…