The endogenous compound anandamide – often referred to as the body’s own marijuana – plays a role in erasing memories of a traumatic event. This was discovered by an international team led by Leiden chemist Mario van der Stelt. The results have been published in Nature Chemical Biology and may provide…

This research project focuses on the thoughts of ethnicity and political orthodoxy in Medieval China by investigating Wang Tong’s works.

Carl Li defended his thesis on 30 June 2015

What drives the restrictiveness of immigration reforms? Political scientists Katharina Natter (Leiden University), Mathias Czaika (Danube University Krems) and Hein de Haas (University of Amsterdam) analysed immigration reforms in 21 Western immigration countries between 1970 and 2012. They found that…

Book by Soledad Valdivia Rivera

A new memorial stone on the facade of a student house in the Hugo de Grootstraat is a reminder of the dozens of Indonesian students who studied in Leiden before and during the Second World War. Some of them were active in the Resistance, which cost a number of them their lives.

This book compares the policies of Australia and Italy towards boat people who have arrived in the two countries since the early 1990s.

In this research note, Van der Does & Kantorowicz aruge that citizens that tend to experience political exclusion are often more supportive of direct and participatory forms of decision-making.

This project aims to provide evidence-based knowledge on the conditions for successful anti-corruption activism in Ukraine.

This study looks at population response to government containment strategies during initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in four high-trust Northern European countries–Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden–with special emphasis on expressions of governmental trust.

In the research master Politics, Culture and National Identities, 1789 to the Present at Leiden University you will be at the forefront of a new approach to understand how politics and identities in Europe are conceived.

Data scientist Lindsey Burggraaff has won the second edition of the Krijn Rietveld Memorial Innovation Award. She receives the prize for her research into bioactive substances in food. ‘Burggraaff's work is situated at a unique intersection of data science, biochemistry and the fields of food and nutrition,’…

On 24 September 2020, Bernardo Ribeiro de Almeida defended his thesis 'Building land tenure systems: the political, legal, and institutional struggles of Timor-Leste'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. A.W. Bedner. Co-supervisor was Dr. C.I.M. Jacobs.

Irna Hofman defended her thesis on 10 January 2019.

A Persistent Revolution: History, Nationalism, and Politics in Mexico since 1968

The new book by Dimiter Toshkov - associate professor of Public Administration at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs - has been recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.

How we think about and act on the usefulness of scientific research has epistemological and political implications: what knowledge consists of, how it comes about and to what ends. In this dissertation, I situate the usefulness of scientific research in concrete places for knowledge exchange. The exchange…

In my research I am concerned with the possibility of a politics of sexuality without reverting to identitarian conceptions of sexuality. In a reading of the work of the American author James Purdy, I propose to move towards a politicizing of the concept of narrative identity as developed by the French…

A group of confidants including a former student of Meijers managed to avert his deportation to a death camp. In her lecture on 27 November, Cleveringa Professor Marjan Schwegman revealed the history of the persecution of the Jewish Professor Eduard Meijers.

This research deals with the royal houses of the Vijayanagara Empire and four of its successor states: Ikkeri, Tanjavur (under both the Nayaka and Bhonsle rulers), Madurai, and Ramnad. This study is thus concerned with dynastic politics and imperial legacies in south India between the 14th and 18th…

What makes a pension scheme sustainable? Most answers to this question have revolved around expert assessments of pension schemes’ affordability or adequacy. This study shifts focus from the financial or social sustainability of pension scheme designs to their political sustainability. The key question…

James Shires has contributed a chapter to the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Cyber Conflict (CyCon 2021), which gathers 20 articles from the law, technology and strategy domains.

Subjects Barbarian, Monstrous, and Wild responds to a contemporary political climate in which historically invested figures of otherness—barbarians, savages, monsters—have become common discursive currency.

Muhammad Adlin Sila examines the range of ways Bima Muslims constitute their Islamic identities and agencies through rituals and festivals. In response to their surroundings, what it means to be a Muslim is constantly being negotiated.

As Bolivia reels from the collapse of the government in November 2019, a wave of social protests, and now the impact of Covid-19, this book asks: where next for Bolivia?

EU foreign policy has become increasingly politicised over the past years, amongst others as a consequence of the succession of crises. Crises may engender processes of crisis framing and contestation. This article focuses on how the policy demands being voiced in these processes of contestation are…

This comparative study investigates court politics in four kingdoms that succeeded the south Indian Vijayanagara empire during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: Ikkeri, Tanjavur, Madurai, and Ramnad. Building on a unique combination of unexplored Indian texts and Dutch archival records, this research…

Kohei Suzuki is Assistant Professor at Institute of Public Administration. This study carries several important implications for understanding the policy impacts of a graying population and for studies of the welfare state, in general.

Does the political context (e.g., democracy vs. authoritarianism) influence what makes people perceive authorities as legitimate?

What is the role of local authorities and communities in shaping how inter-Schengen borders are understood and dealt with?

Liu Puning defended his thesis on 25 April 2018.

A new paperback edition of Brian Heffernan's book Freedom and the Fifth Commandment. Catholic priests and political violence in Ireland, 1919-21 was published by Manchester University Press in September 2016.

On the 8th of September Yun-An Olivia Dung successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a two-volume project, authored by an international team of researchers, and offering the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe.

Political scientist Wouter Veenendaal received an NWO Veni grant for his research on the political stability of small states. 'I find small states fascinating, they are almost always excluded from comparative research, while in fact they often challenge existing theories in political science.'

This book systematically evaluates the empirical evidence for legitimacy decline in established democracies, the explanatory power of theories of legitimacy decline, and promises new routes in investigating and assessing political legitimacy.

This study aims to examine how South Korea (hereafter, Korea) and Japan, two neighboring countries in Northeast Asia, have been responding to and mitigating the spread of COVID-19.

Big data promises to transform public decision-making for the better by making it more responsive to actual needs and policy effects. However, much recent work on big data in public decision-making assumes a rational view of decision-making, which has been much criticized in the public administration…

How did the Chinese in Indonesia respond to anti-Chinese violence and changing political conditions during the Indonesian revolution?

Political scientist Nicholas Vrousalis (Leiden University) reviews the recent literature on exploitation. He istinguishes between three main species of exploitation theory: (a) teleology-based (including harm and mutual benefit) accounts, (b) respect-based (including mere means, force, rights, and fairness)…