This book explores the lasting legacy of the controversial project by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded by the CIA, to promote Western culture and liberal values in the battle of ideas with global Communism during the Cold War.

A new special issue on translation and the cultural Cold War sheds light on the understudied and yet important role of translation in cultural transfer.

The Afro-Asianism of the early Cold War has long remained buried under the narrative of Bandung, homogenising and subverting the different visions of post-colonial worldmaking that co-existed alongside the Bandung project.

How was anti-communism organized in the West? New volume edited by Giles Scott-Smith, Luc van Dongen and Stephanie Roulin on the aims, arguments and associations of a range of transnational anti-communist activists during the Cold War.

On 1 September 2022 Güldeniz Kibris successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

In Freedom on the Offensive, William Michael Schmidli illuminates how the Reagan administration's embrace of democracy promotion was a defining development in US foreign relations in the late twentieth century.

In this article, Ben de Jong, research fellow at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, examines the relationship between double agents and their handlers.

This is the 2017 paperback release of William Michael Schmidli's The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere, which won the 2013 Foreign Affairs Magazine Best Book of the Year.

Robert Pee, William Michael Schmidli (Eds.) This book posits that democracy promotion played a key role in the Reagan administration’s Cold War foreign policy.

In Reframing the Diplomat Albertine Bloemendal offers a unique window onto the unofficial dimension of Cold War transatlantic relations by analyzing the diplomatic role of the Dutch Atlanticist Ernst van der Beugel as a government official and as a private diplomat.

Does foreign aid promote human rights?

Southern Crossings: Indian activists and the Afro-Asian movement in the early Cold War era

Subproject of

Through a range of case studies spanning the post-Cold War period in Iraq, Moldova and Serbia, this book studies asymmetric conflicts where warring sides exhibit vast power differentials.

The historiography of the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 is dominated by the personal clash between the principal negotiators, Harry Dexter White of the United States and John Maynard Keynes of Britain.

This dissertation explores how domestic political power struggles in Greece and Turkey during the Cold War engaged with the ongoing conflict in Cyprus and aims to demonstrate how socialist parties in Greece and Turkey struggled with the concept of the “nation” in battling for power and political positioning…

The formation and evolution of galaxies is fundamentally driven by the formation of new stars out of cold gas.

Understanding how galaxies form, interact, and evolve comes largely from comparing theory predictions with observational data. Numerical simulations of galaxies provide the most accurate approach to testing the theory, as they follow the non-linear evolution of gas and dark matter in great detail and…

PhD defence

The project focusses on how US views of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia influenced its strategic interpretations of the region. Being eleven million strong, dispersed across the region and sharing ethnic ties with Communist China, interpretations of the diaspora intersected with key Cold War…

Bas Rietjens and his colleagues researched the Russia-Ukraine war, exploring this multitude of facets and their interconnections.

Conference

Zeynep Sarlak defended her thesis on 25 August 2020

Exchanges between different cultures and institutions of learning have taken place for centuries, but it was only in the twentieth century that such efforts evolved into formal programs that received focused attention from nation-states, empires and international organizations.

Lecture

The research group War, Peace and Justice brings together scholars, researchers as well as current and former practitioners to explore issues related to the drivers, nature and (new) dynamics of war and conflict, comprehensive approaches to the promotion of sustainable peace, and the role of justice…

This reflection for Critical Studies on Terrorism, explores two decades of the 'War of Terror' and what it means today.

Why do some civil wars experience quagmire, a situation in which belligerents are trapped in fighting? To explain this puzzle, Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl (Leiden University Institute of Political Science) analyses the overlapping strategic interactions between foreign powers and the warring parties. Studying…

In the track War and Peace Studies, you will gain a thorough understanding of the history, theories as well as the contemporary and future policy challenges related to war, warfare, and the multidimensional promotion of peace.

In 1940 the Germany occupiers ordered the dismissal of all Jewish staff of the university. This resulted in protest speeches by fellow academics.

Information about the situation in Ukraine

Leiden University commemorates its victims of the war and pays tribute to all members of the university community who resisted injustice. Rudolph Cleveringa, for instance, the dean of the law faculty who gave a protest speech in 1940 after his Jewish colleagues were fired. We honour their memory through…

Despite the wealth of historical literature on the Second World War, the subject of religion and churches in occupied Europe has been undervalued.

The Global Politics of Confucianism, a monograph contracted with Columbia University Press, analyzes the interaction between Confucianism and globalism in past and present, using history to critically engage Confucianism’s place in contemporary international relations and policy debates.

Citizens in multiple crime-ridden countries strongly support the militarization of security—that is, placing the military in charge of traditional policing duties. Yet, we know little about the determinants of such support. Do people approve of militarization even in the face of human fatalities? Political…

Writing under Wartime Conditions is a study into North and South Korean literature written during the Korean War.

In this minor, you will learn about the structure, working methods, and the analysis techniques used by intelligence and security agencies in the Western world.

This book argues that Armenians around the world – in the face of the Genocide, and despite the absence of an independent nation-state after World War I – developed dynamic socio-political, cultural, ideological and ecclesiastical centres. And it focuses on one such centre, Beirut, in the postcolonial…

Studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the Centenary of Snouck Hurgronje's

The NWO-funded Vidi project “American foreign policy and liberalism” challenges the idea that the United States has created and sustained a “liberal international order” since World War II. It instead explores the ways in which illiberal ideologies – such as those underpinning racial hierarchy at home…

Why do communities form militias to defend themselves against violence during civil war? Using original interviews with former combatants and civilians and archival material from extensive fieldwork in Mozambique, Corinna Jentzsch (Leiden University Institute of Political Science) explains the timing,…