CompaRe aims to be a hub in a global network on comparative regional integration. For regional integration is key to meeting the challenges of our globalising world. The LEAC is now also part of the CompaRe.

Within the Comparative Religion Network staff and graduate students from LIAS-LUCSoR (and beyond) discuss ongoing work and cooperate on key issues in the comparative and systematic study of religion.

Bringing together a globally representative team of scholars, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of comparative syntax, the study of universal and variable properties of the structure of building blocks in natural language.

Common challenge: unique circumstances

Comparative and Dutch Politics is one of the three organisational clusters of the Institute of Political Science.

What is emotion in human and nonhuman animals? How do emotions get to expression and how do they impact on our interactions, our decisions to trust, distrust or cooperate? Why do we mimic and synchronise affective processes?

In this article, Bart Schuurman and Sarah Louise Carthy explore the distinctions between radicalised individuals and the general population

The study of language in change.

The master's programme Comparative Criminal Justice at Leiden University focuses on criminology, criminal law and their mutual relationship. The programme offers an international comparative perspective, analysing criminal justice systems, legislation and policies in common law and civil law countri…

Are you thinking about studying Comparative Criminal Justice? Learn more and watch the videos

The research programme Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics brings together LUCL researchers who focus mainly on descriptive and comparative linguistics.

The ‘Locke drawings’ collection and the representation of Brazilian native peoples in global perspective

This Global and Comparative Philosophy master’s programme is unique in Europe. It offers comparative perspectives from around the world that will enable you to be part of the next generation of thinkers: someone studying and shaping philosophy for a globalised 21st century.

Reconstructing language history and prehistory in the context of the Indo-European language family.

Almost all languages of Europe and of a large part of western Asia belong to a single language family, which is called Indo-European, and which includes modern languages like English, Dutch, Russian, Farsi, but also ancient ones like Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite and Sanskrit.

All crested and marbled newts (the genus Triturus) suffer from an unusual genetic abnormality, called a balanced lethal system, that kills exactly half of their offspring. How can a trait so disadvantageous have survived millions of years of natural selection?

In my research, I used a comparative wood anatomical approach to address wood evolution of the (largely) tropical flowering plant families Apocynaceae and Sapotaceae.

Kohei Suzuki and his co-authors reflect on their extensive scholarly experience teaching comparative public administration across diverse countries including Canada, the Netherlands, Qatar, and the United States.

This Philosophy: Global and Comparative Perspectives bachelor's programme is unique. It offers comparative perspectives from around the world that will enable you to be part of the next generation of thinkers, someone studying and shaping philosophy for a globalised 21st century.

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.

Study information, Online Experience

This six-weeks online course delves into the research behind terrorism as it unpacks the assumptions and impacts of both terrorism and counterterrorism.

This project contests the assumption of criminologists that gender differences in recorded crime are static over time and that women are in general less likely to commit a crime than men.

Indo-European is the name of the language family to which English belongs, along with many sub-families such as Germanic languages and Romance languages. In this course, you will delve into the structure and origins of these branches, the oldest languages belonging to the language family, linguistic…

How has migration affected Irish and Italy society since 1945?

This thesis investigates the syntax of object marking in Sambaa and the Bantu languages in general, with particular focus on Swahili and Haya, as points of comparison.

Comparison across jurisdictions is one way of assessing the appropriateness of lethal force resulting from the actions of law enforcement agencies. This article sets out a vision for a global use of force monitor that can enable meaningful comparisons between law enforcement agencies. It examines some…

A comparative analysis of legitimation strategies in tree hybrid regimes: Russia, Venezuela, and Seychelles.

The central aim is to systematically study differences in gendered crime patterns in the records of different types of courts in various English and Dutch cities in the early modern period.

Joe Finnerty has co-edited the 2026 Symposium in the Human Rights Law Review entitled Legitimate Aims and Ulterior Purposes in International Human Rights Law: Comparative Perspectives.

In this dissertation I argue that the proto-daoist text the Zhuangzi and the ethical relation of Levinas are fruitful resources to reconsider the self-other relation in comparative philosophy.

We study expressions of emotion and social decision making across species.

In this project we study the properties of statistical- and rule-learning mechanisms in relation to the acquisition and evolution of language. We ask to what extent these mechanisms are unique to humans - or to human language - by comparing the acquisition of vocal structure in two species: humans (infants)…

Online data breaches are recurrent and damaging cyber incidents fors organizations worldwide. This study examines how organizations can effectively mitigate reputational damages in the aftermath of data breaches by hacking, through situational crisis communication strategies.

We complete this thematic issue’s contribution on skill, food, and sustainability with a team report based on ethnographic research which focuses on reskilling for sustainability in multiple European locations and involving diverse social actors and stakeholders. The Food Citizens? project (2017-2024)…

How did digital intermediality symbolise and facilitate the transfer of content from popular culture into policy statements and vice versa in the period between 1945 and the new millenium?

The aim of this research was to establish if Ebeling's semiotactic theory and method of semiotactic analysis, as described in his works Syntax and Semantics (1978), Een Inleiding tot de Syntaxis (1994) and Semiotaxis, over Theoretische en Nederlandse Syntaxis (2006), could be applied to Modern Japanese…

While phenomenology and Yogacara Buddhism are both known for their investigations of consciousness, there exists a core tension between them: phenomenology affirms the existence of essence, whereas Yogacara Buddhism argues that everything is empty of essence (svabhava). How is constructive cultural…

Taught from primary school to the university level – where new courses on the globalization of the Arabic writing system have cropped up (Abdallah 2014) – the Arabic script, with all its orthographic peculiarities and multiple facets, continues to shape languages other than Arabic, their communities…

The protection of civilians (POC) in armed conflict has become a core strategic objective for the United Nations system and for UN peace operations in particular. The UN, however, is not the sole actor engaged in POC.

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…

Currently the focus of the project is the development of a tool that utilizes dimensionality reduction techniques in order to analyze and interpret the lexical and phonological variation between different sign languages. Additionally, the application of deep learning techniques for the extraction of…

This book rigorously investigates the contemporary state of children's rights and the multifaceted challenges facing children, uncovering the complexities at their core.

Research on the morality of life insurance. What issues are raised when insurance companies define responsibility and solidarity? Has insurance changed since the crisis of 2007?

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

CompaRe’s third virtual PhD roundtable was held on 29 March 2023. In attendance were the head of the centre, staff and PhD candidates. The roundtable focused on brainstorming a wide range of questions around the research process.

In the early modern period women played a prominent role in crime. At times they even made up half of all defendants. Female criminality was a typically urban phenomenon. Why do we find so many women before the Dutch criminal courts?

To what extent are there differences between countries in and outside the European Union and the Schengen area in the level of crimmigration, the merger between migration control and crime control, and to what extent can these differences be explained by the way in which state and non-state actors in…