The World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official

An interdisciplinary collection of the best international scholarship on Muslim youth.

On young Muslims seeking to understand their place and make their way in a transformed world.

How did institutions and structures operate throughout the Muslim world from the earliest history of Islam into the early modern period?

Scholars have long debated the intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East. Some claim the organization supports terrorism, while others believe it is a positive force for democratization.

With regard to governance, policies and law, many Muslims and Muslim countries recognise the possibility that Islam has something important to say about the way society is to be ordered, governed, and regulated.

A project aimed at understanding the complicated process of religious transformation in one of the centres of the early Muslim world.

How have Muslims imagined the world before Muhammad? Stories about pre-Islamic times feature across all genres and periods of Arabic literature, and while many writers have derided the pre-Islamic past as disorderly paganism, others celebrate its memory as a time of Arab nobility and fine literature.…

Lezing, LUCIS What's New?! Series

What forms does religiosity take among Muslims in Europe today? How are answers to the question of what it means to be a Muslim in Europe reached in institutions of Islamic higher education, Muslim student organizations, and women’s organizations? What is the relation between the individual and religious…

This article presents the findings of an explanatory study into the perceptions of Dutch Muslims in The Hague concerning pre-emptive counter-extremism and de-radicalisation policies.

Migration imposes special pressures on the meaning, experience and organization of lifecycle rituals. These pressures are felt most strongly by Muslim migrants to Western Europe. In this innovative study, Nathal M. Dessing examines the effects of migration on the life cycle rituals of Moroccan, Turkish…

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…

Anthropology of Law in Muslim Sudan analyses the hybridity of law systems and the plurality of legal practices in rural and urban contexts of contemporary Sudan, shedding light on the complex relation between Islam and society.

The Cinematic Santri explores the rise and course over the last ten years of cinematic practices among a younger generation of NU associates (Nahdlatul Ulama), the largest traditionalist Muslim group in Indonesia and elsewhere.

Mr. Sujadi defended his thesis on 29 June 2017

Ömer Gürlesin defended his thesis on 28 November 2018

What made the early Islamic empire so successful and have we missed the story by neglecting crucial evidence? The 7th-century Arab conquests changed the socio-political configurations in the Mediterranean and Eurasia forever. Yet we do not really know how the Arabs managed to gain dominance of this…

In the Special Issue of Matatu: “Power to the People?” Patronage, Intervention and Transformation in African Performative Artspaper, Annachiara Raia seeks to investigate the manifold relationships between traditional and contemporary, oral and written Swahili poetry, in the utendi and mashairi forms…

Some conflicts involve many Muslims as foreign fighters; other conflicts attract only relatively few combatants from abroad. Isabele Duvesteyn and Bram Peeters

Reconfigurations of Practice, Community and Authority in Contemporary Aceh

Lezing, LUCIS Lecture | Islam in North Africa

The State & Society network critically interrogates the assumption that state and society are a priori conceptual and empirical objects.

This collection of essays is the first to compare the emergence and development of these different types of regional identities.

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the Islamic State's use of images taken by drones, drawing on a dataset of ISIS propaganda images from October 2016 to December 2018.

In this project of the Center for Public Values & Ethics (CPVE) ongoing research is conducted on the history of advice to Dutch central government by so-called State committees from 1814 to 2014. State committees have been installed by Dutch central government since 1814 to provide expert advice, research…

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…

This research cluster is a part of the Institute of Political Science’s research programme ‘Institutions, Decisions and Collective Behaviour’. Its members focus on political economy issues, examining the roles of states and markets, regulation, political institutions, rules and norms in national and…

State Building Through Life Stories: Incorporating Local Perspectives

How can we implement the technique of pharmacological resting-state fMRI to improve the diagnosis of dementia?

The Europa Instituut is pleased to announce that on 21 November 2016 a new handbook “EU State Aids” (31 Chapters, 1500 pages) was published.

This edited volume by Jeff Fynn-Paul pushes forward the debate on the role of entrepreneurs in making war and building states in Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

Promotor: W.Th.F. den Hollander Co-Promotor: F.M. Spieksma

This dissertations studies state-society relations in 1930s Turkey, focusing on the anti-veiling campaigns in the mid-1930s and aiming to understand the ways in which the Kemalist policies were received, interpreted, negotiated, compromised and/or resisted by various actors in the provinces.

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…

All players on the world stage operate strategically in order to safeguard their interests. Political scientists at Leiden University cast light on this volatile interplay of forces. Their research helps voters, NGOs, governments and international organizations make smart choices in this complex and…

Sharia Incorporated: A Comparative Overview of the Legal Systems of Twelve Muslim Countries in Past and Present

Politically speaking, the Frisian coastal area constitutes a special case in late medieval Europe since it was not subject to an overlord as it withstood feudalization in the 13th century. Its many sub regions, which were dominated by elites of small noblemen and freeholders, long time succeeded in…

During the 1980s and early 2000s, authors like Alex Schmid and Andrew Silke demonstrated the paucity of first-hand insights being used to study terrorism and the consequences this had for the reliability of the findings beings presented. But to what extent have these issues endured?

Leiden Public Administration alumnus Jeffrey Jonkers negotiates in Syria with the Assad government, civilians and even with IS. The UN peace talks are due to start shortly in Geneva. Jonkers negotiates behind the scenes.

Antoaneta Dimitrova, Professor Comparative Governance at Leiden University, Honorata Mazepus, Assistant professor at Leiden University and Dimiter Toshkov, Associate Professor at Leiden University, together with three other authors researched which aspects of state capacity might contribute to opening…

Leiden researchers study the extent to which Asian citizens can invoke the rights that they have on paper. This knowledge helps them advise the different levels of government and NGOs on how to improve the lot of poor citizens in particular.

This monograph, written by dr. Dennie Oude Nijhuis and published by Cambridge University Press, discusses the postwar development of the welfare state.

Yi-Wen Cheng defended her thesis on 28 May 2015

A discourse on international cyber norms has emerged ever since the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security (UN GGE) recommended eleven norms on responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.

On 16 June 2020, Andrea Varga defended her thesis 'Establishing State Responsibility in the Absence of Effective Government'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. N.J. Schrijver and Prof. F. Baetens (University of Oslo).

On 27 June 2019, Vid Prislan defended his thesis 'Domestic Courts in Investor-State Arbitration: Partners, Suspects, Competitors'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. dr. N.J. Schrijver.