Maartje van der Woude, together with Dr Irene Vega, has won the 2024 Theoretical Criminology Best Article Prize for the article ‘Colourblindness across borders: The de-racialised logics of Dutch and American border agents’ in the journal Theoretical Criminology.

We are delighted to welcome Caitriona Heinl as Visiting Fellow of The Hague Program for Cyber Norms at Leiden University’s Institute of Security and Global Affairs from 22 January till 16 February 2018.

After the summer break, the ILS Lunch Seminar series is back for its fourth and final year. These monthly seminars present the perfect opportunity to unite the different institutes situated within Leiden Law School and have steadily developed into somewhat of a tradition. On Thursday 19 September 2019,…

He’s a fast and animated speaker, which is only logical because Gerard van Westen is driving an express train. His destination? A virtual human, consisting of algorithms that predict what an administered substance will do in the body. The train is already a long way down the line and the pharmaceutical…

That the tax authorities are allowed to impose taxes is widely known. What is less well known is when the tax authorities must impose taxes. And what to do when one set of regulations requires the tax authorities to impose taxes while other regulations prevent them from doing exactly that? Vergouwen’s…

For many years, human rights have been considered a playing field in which states were the most important actors. It is they who in multilateral relations, such as the United Nations (UN), the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), have written international…

The Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA) is pleased to introduce a new research seminar series. The FGGA Research Seminar will be a forum for the presentation and discussion of current, high-quality research on topics covered by the faculty.

Friday 25 April 2025 | Leiden University Institute of Security and Global Affairs – The Hague

Debates about the ‘end’ of the Roman era, how, when, and even if it ended, are still very much alive and raging. However, what happened after the (long) late antique period is a lesser-known and lesser-studied subject. The post-Roman past needs, however, as much energetic investigation and discussion.…

Recently, the so-called refugee crisis has been framed as a threat for well-developed welfare states in Europe by the president of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem. According to him, external borders have to be guarded, because otherwise ‘loads of people will come to demand support and they blow up…

Frans Stoelinga defended his thesis on 19 November 2020.

Presentations related to this chair.

Lecture, INVISIHIST event

On Thursday 28 January 2016, Prof. Carsten Stahn contributed to the OPCW Sub-Working Group on Non-State Actors, together with Professors Andrew Clapham (Geneva) and Dapo Akande (Oxford), in the presence of the Ahmet Üzümcü, Director-General of the OPCW.

The debate about state behaviour in cyberspace may be set in the wrong legal key.

View the course structure for the MSc International Organisation at Leiden University. Includes semester overview, ECTS credits, and course descriptions for the September start in The Hague.

PhD candidate Lieuwe Vinkhuijzen received the VERSEN Master Thesis Award 3rd prize for his master’s thesis on quantum computing. ‘A forward-looking thesis that solves problems in software engineering; not in the next decade, but beyond’, according to the jury.

Leiden experts examine European legislation and ways in which better European legislation lead to citizens' support.

New archaeological research into grave goods and skeletal material from the oldest grave field in the Netherlands shows that male-female roles 7,000 words ago were less traditional than was thought. The research was conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Archol, the National Museum…

The CADS Asia Research Cluster extends the legacy of the Institute’s Asia focus into the future, as an important hub in international networks on the study of Asia and through active engagement with colleagues in Asia. Within the Institute the Asia Research Cluster offers a platform for anthropologists…

On 27 November the official opening of LeidenGlobal will be celebrated in the Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde/National Museum of Ethnology. LeidenGlobal is a platform for global expertise that responds to the call from Minister of Education and Culture Jet Bussemakers that academic and cultural institutions…

How is law shaped by and shaping social, political and economic change in Indonesia?

China is a one-party regime, yet elections are held for the local congresses. PhD candidate Wang Zhongyuan investigated how the Communist Party uses this democratic instrument to strengthen the authoritarian regime. PhD defence 31 January.

Researchers from Leiden University, the Netherlands, designed a novel metamaterial that buckles on demand. Small structural variations in the material single out regions that buckle selectively under external stress, whereas other regions remain unchanged. The research is published in this week’s Early…

If you're in Leiden this week, you can't miss the large groups of international students exploring the city. The Orientation Week Leiden (OWL) - the twice-yearly introduction week for international students - started on Tuesday 24 January, this time with more than 400 new students. ‘Every second building…

Political scientist Gisela Hirschmann (Leiden University) has been awarded a fellowship at Harvard University. During the 2020 Spring semester she will join the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs to further her research on multilateralism.

Restructuring of corporate groups was discussed at the joint conference of the European Law Institute (ELI) and the Business & Liability Research Network of Leiden University took place in Leiden (the Netherlands). During this conference, developments at both the national and European levels were discussed.…

The EU-funded project SKIES (SKilled, Innovative and Entrepreneurial Scientists) will train astronomy graduate students in transferable skills for academia and industry. SKIES integrates open science, social innovation and entrepreneurship topics. The project kicked off on 1 March and will run for…

What is the difference between highly visible and poorly visible monuments on the alignment? And is this difference reflected in the social position of the dead buried underneath these mounds.

From cities that sometimes deviate from national foreign policy to the direct influence of geopolitics on local developments, PhD candidate Pieter Jeroense, director of VNG International, examined seventy years of the internationalisation of Dutch municipalities and observed notable trends.

Leiden University’s Department of Labour Law and Social Security is proud to announce that the International Labor Rights Case Law Journal (ILaRC) is set to publish its tenth volume this year. A valuable initiative of Paul van der Heijden, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Labour Law and former…

Vanuatu, a Pacific island state vulnerable to rising sea levels and increasingly violent storms, initiated a resolution to be submitted to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday 29 March 2023.

As of 1 June 2018 Olaf van Vliet has been appointed as Professor of Comparative Welfare State Analysis at Leiden University. The Endowed Chair in Comparative Welfare State Analysis is supported by Instituut Gak. This chair is embedded in both the Department of Economics (Leiden Law School) and the Institute…

On 26 and 27 September, Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, Carlotta Rigotti, Mohammed Raiz Shaffique, Marie Schwed-Shenker and Antoni Mut Piña participated in the third edition of Lawtomation Days at the IE University in Madrid.

A team of researchers at Leiden University’s Europa Institute authored an extensive study on the potential for a Climate and Energy Union within the EU constitutional framework. The study was published by the European Parliament in December 2024.

Within just a few years, the Chinese government's policy towards the Uyghurs deteriorated sharply. From control and marginalisation, it shifted to violation of human rights. PhD candidate Elke Spiessens was right in the middle of it with her research. 'The fabric of the community is being completely…

In his blog, Armin suggests two legal tools that may jointly help avoid a hard Brexit: delayed exit and decreasing membership.

More and more countries have decided to introduce compulsory vaccination. According to various experts, compulsory vaccination, under certain conditions, could help the situation in the Netherlands.

On 6 September 2018 Jacqueline Vel of the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society organised a master class on ‘Access to Justice’ at the invitation of the Wira Wacana Christian University in Waingapu, Sumba, Indonesia.

Rühlig, Tim Nicholas, ed., China’s foreign policy contradictions lessons from China’s R2P, Hong Kong, and WTO policy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). Pp. xvi +259. €90.81 (Hardcover). €51.12 (E-Book). ISBN-13: 979-8212055383.

In October, LUCIS and NIMAR will host a two-day workshop in honor of the 50th anniversary of Islam Observed, Clifford Geertz' comparative study of Islam in Morocco and Indonesia. Send in your proposal and get a chance to share your work in Rabat this fall.

This remarkable statement appears in Yi-Wen Cheng’s dissertation on state monopoly and forms of competition in the Chinese tobacco industry. Cheng presents her conclusions and looks back on her fieldwork. ‘I had to accept a lot of drinks in order to establish a network of contacts.’

A symposium on space diplomacy for experts and the general public will take place in The Hague on Monday 12 June. Everyone has an interest in learning more about this topic, says Professor Jan Melissen. ‘The scope of international relations has expanded beyond our planet.’

On Thursday 14 March, the third ILS Lunch Seminar of this year took place. In this well visited seminar, Nienke van Heek and Esther van Ginneken gave two very insightful presentations on their respective research topics.

From 11 to 21 June 2019 eleven students took part on the Honours summer course Dilemma’s in het migratierecht (Dilemmas in migration law).

On 29 September 2023, Carlotta Rigotti and Eduard Fosch-Villaronga participated in the Lawtomation Days at the IE University. They presented the preliminary findings of desk and empirical research on fairness of AI applications in the labour market that had been conducted for the Horizon Europe BIAS…

Het NIMAR is een instituut van de Universiteit Leiden dat studenten van verschillende studierichtingen de mogelijkheid biedt om zich te verdiepen in de Marokkaanse cultuur.

During the second Arthur Docters van Leeuwen Lecture on 2 December, AIVD Director Erik Akerboom underlined how the changing threat landscape demands reflective leadership, transparency where possible and close cooperation to protect the democratic legal order.