On 9 September 2020, Ruben de Graaff defended his thesis 'Concurrence in European Private Law'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. A.G. Castermans and Prof. S.C.G. Van den Bogaert.

European policy affects our lives: from air quality to the frequency of a bus service. Leiden researchers analyse how the European Union functions, how countries apply European policy and whether this policy actually provides solutions and delivers.

In this article, Madeleine Hosli, Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, and Jaroslaw Kantorowicz, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global affairs, discusses the relevance of structural variables in a time where European politics are…

How do crises produce changes in specific European Union foreign policy areas, and how should we conceptualise these policy changes?

Cristina Grasseni’s project

This edited volume offers a critical discussion of the trade-offs between transparency and secrecy in the actual political practice of democratic states in Europe. As such, it answers to a growing need to systematically analyse the problem of secrecy in governance in this political and geographical…

What are the environmental trade-offs for SMEs considering moving from monoculture aquaculture practice towards IMTA? What are the environmental trade-offs comparing IMTA species with their conventional monoculture alternatives?

Grasseni's contribution to this special feature on food cultures, food systems, and agriculture in Europe builds upon her ongoing project Food citizens? Collective food procurement in European cities: solidarity and diversity, skills and scale.

This book is the first comparative study of estimative intelligence and strategic surprise in a European context, complementing and testing insights from previous studies centred on the United States. It does extensive empirical analysis of open-source material and interviews in relation to three cases…

On 7 September 2023 Didem Durak Akser successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

PhD defence

The book addresses the question “How and why do people become involved in European homegrown jihadism?

The Master’s in European Union Studies at Leiden University offers students an opportunity to study the EU from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

Mariana de Campos Françoso and Amy Strecker published a new article in the International Journal of Cultural Property last week entitled 'Caribbean Collections in European Museums and the Question of Returns'.

The first results of the “Policing European Metropolises project” (PEMP) that associate Professor Elke Devroe and Professor P. Ponsaers launched in April 2013 are now published. Having been the referent for The Netherlands and Belgium in the Urbis project (Leonardo programme), the project focuses on…

The European courtroom as political arena? Judicial interference in politically charged issues in European asylum law and criminal law

Lecture, European Union Seminar

Project leader Esther Kentin has published an article on the European chemical regulation REACH and the restriction of microplastics in a physics journal.

The Law of the European Union is a complete reference work on all aspects of the law of the European Union, including the institutional framework, the Internal Market, Economic and Monetary Union and external policy and action.

On 13 February, Professor Matthias Haentjens spoke at the conference “Proportionality in European Banking Regulation” at the Bank of Greece. This conference was organized by the Greek central bank, in cooperation with the University of Piraeus and the European Banking Institute (EBI).

European integration is under pressure. At the same time, the notion of a European administrative space is being explicitly voiced. But does a shared idea of the public servant exist in Europe?

On 7 April 2017 Labour Law professor Heerma van Voss spoke on reduction of working time in European countries during the economic crisis at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Miskolc, Hungary.

Brexit has been a kind of shock therapy for the EU and has eventually led to more appreciation for European cooperation. That is what Professor Luuk van Middelaar claimed on 30 November at the conference ‘Brexit and the future of the European Union’ which marked the 60th anniversary of the Europa Institute…

The Institute of Private Law at Leiden University kindly invites you to an online book launch of the book Legal Pluralism in European Contract Law. The author will introduce the theme and summarise the main conclusions of the book, followed by comments from two panelists. Afterwards, there will be a…

Context and contents of the Izcatqui manuscript in the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam

Nikki Ikani, Assistant Professor Intelligence and Security at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA), has recently published her latest monograph 'Crisis and change in European Union foreign policy' with Manchester University Press.

The annual excursion of the Adv. LLM programme in European and International Human Rights Law (EIHRL) took place from Sunday 16 to Saturday 21 April.

A look into the political history of collecting and the collections of Andean mummies in Western European museums from 1830-1930 through archaeology and paleoimaging.

Research on this theme concerns Europe’s position in global markets, its response to the emergence of new international trade and financial actors that challenge institutions where Europe has long had considerable influence.

The presence and participation of interest groups in policymaking processes has become a crucial component of Western democracies. These groups link society and policymakers and influence public policy choices. Their function however, is often taken for granted and not very well researched. Adrià Albareda…

How can we understand the implementation of EU policy and what challenges are involved?

This dissertation approaches collections of Andean mummies in European national and university museums as the focus to understand the relationship between objects, documents, and the practice of collecting in the period from 1850 to 1930. Over 200 mummies, kept by 18 different museums in Western European…

Archaeologist Quentin Bourgeois received an NWO Vidi grant to investigate the emergence of a pan-European culture in the third millennium BC. ‘We see ideas being shared across the entire continent in pre-literate societies. And not only that, for a thousand years, the same cultural ideas persist.’

The European Council and the European Commission have a similar role in agenda setting. Both place issues on the EU agenda. However, these institutions have distinct designs. They have different political attributes (the European Council has considerably more political authority) and information-processing…

How can groundbreaking research help Europe tackle the huge challenges it faces? At the launch of the Leiden Europe Hub, academics and policymakers discussed this in the heart of European democracy: the European Parliament.

On 20 June 2025, Melanie Fink presented her research on ‘Robo Swarms and Polygraphs: The Future of European Border Management and its Human Costs’ at the Research Workshop on ‘Migration law at the intersection of international, EU and domestic law: institutional structures and the protection of human…

The Centre for the History of European Integration (CHEI) is an initiative that brings together scholars working on European integration, broadly conceived, from a historical perspective.

On 25 August 2018, the Leiden Adv. LLM Study Programme in European and International Business Law (EIBL) celebrated 25 years of its existence.

This paper, written by Silvia D'Amato & Andrea Terlizzi, investigates the extent to which the European Union is strategically engaging against terrorism.

Leiden University takes part in several European research and education projects.

This paper develops a novel theoretical framework for the conduct of postmortems after major foreign policy surprises for the European Union and its member states.

Set up in 1991, this unique project aims to identify and describe the common lexical heritage of the most important Indo-European languages and language branches. The project has thus far resulted in twelve volumes published as The Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series (Brill, Leiden).

What political factors affect the speed or duration of EU legislative decision-making?

On 21 April 2016, Leiden University College The Hague, in collaboration with The Hague Institute for Global Justice and the T.M.C. Asser Institute, hosted a book launch and panel discussion for Dr. Joris Larik’s new monograph “Foreign Policy Objectives in European Constitutional Law”, which has recently…

Our research deals with the deep history of Europe and Eurasia, from the inception of farming up until the beginning of the Roman Period. This was a period in which key developments took place that had a profound impact on European landscapes and society until the present day. Our research and teaching…

The project Advancing The European Multilingual Experience (AThEME) studied multilingualism in Europe by incorporating and combining linguistic, cognitive and sociological perspectives.

Our Master Law in European and International Human Rights Law (LL.M.) looks at the various human rights protection mechanisms from a comparative perspective