Are you thinking about studying Public Administration: Economics and Governance? Learn more and watch the videos.

The Social and Economic Psychology specialisation offers in-depth knowledge of a broad range of theories and research domains in this area, all concerning the way people’s social environment influences thoughts, feelings, and behaviour.

Are you curious about how economics, law and governance shape our society? At Leiden University, you’ll explore financial systems, public administration, international relations and legal frameworks. From international law to public policy, from global diplomacy to financial regulation: you’ll learn…

Are you curious about how economics, law and governance shape our society? At Leiden University, you’ll explore financial systems, public administration, international relations and legal frameworks. From international law to public policy, from global diplomacy to financial regulation: you’ll learn…

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 first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide.

On Wednesday, 14 May 2025, Catherine O'Regan will deliver the annual Van Vollenhoven Lecture

What are the essential determinants of (dis)trust? And, what are the effects of being (dis)trusted?

What categories exist in the languages of pastoralists? Do these semantic concepts reflect universal or languagespecific tendencies? What (environment? culture?) governs the similarities (or the differences) attested crosslinguistically in cattle colour systems?

This project examines the notion of sacred fertility and sacred landscapes, associated rituals and material culture, both archaeological and ethnographic manifestations in the Horn of Africa.

Promotores: G.R. de Snoo, B. Sinsin, Co-Promotor: H.H. de Iongh

The project Multimedia Research and Documentation of African Oral Genres: Connecting Diasporas and Local Audiences (Director: D.Merolla) focuses on multimedia as technology that allows scholars to share documentation and scientific knowledge with the cultural owners of the collected oral genres.

African oral literatures, new media and technologies: challenges for research and documentation

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…

‘Can he do it?’ Since the remarkable victory of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 2015 Nigerian presidential elections, this has arguably been the most frequently posed question in Nigerian politics.

Courses in English.

Promotores: G.R. de Snoo, W.T. de Groot, Co-promotor: C.J.M. Musters

The ECtHR needs to provide effective rights protection, but it also needs to set clear standards while showing deference to decisions made at the national level. Especially when socio-economic issues are concerned, meeting these different demands is a challenging task.

Early Childhood Community Practitioners’ analyses of new mother’s challenges in Alexandra Township South Africa: a collaboration between academics and practitioners

Using an interdisciplinary experimental approach grounded in behavioral economics and personality psychology, we identify an antisocial personality profile and examine its role across strategic contexts.

To limit the effects of climate change, global average temperature since pre-industrial measurements are to be kept well below 2 °C preferably even at 1.5 °C.

Han De Jong gave an overview of (the run-up to) the current economic crisis and discussed which steps could be taken to resolve this crisis.

The Leiden African Studies Centre (ASCL) will become part of the University from 1 January 2016.

Promotor: Prof.dr. E.F. Smets, Co-promotor: T.R. van Andel

This project aims to systematically investigate the influence of information structure on nominal licensing in a subset of Bantu languages.

Leiden University will deepen its cooperation with knowledge institutions in Africa. During a trip to Ghana, a delegation spoke with several African knowledge institutions about intensifying their collaboration.

This systematic review of 68 English-language articles explores the roles of customary authorities in environmental governance in sub-Saharan Africa

North Korean workers designed and built numerous monuments, museums and other buildings in southern Africa. This is clear from research by history student Tycho van der Hoog for his master's thesis. These monuments can be an important source of income for a country that has become quite isolated on…

This Encyclopedia presents insights into societal change through the lens of economic anthropology. Interdisciplinary in scope, it outlines emerging themes in the field and explicitly connects theoretical debates to in-depth empirical evidence.

Pursuing Whiteness in the Colonies offers a new comprehension of colonial history from below by taking remnants of individual agencies from a whiteness studies perspective. It highlights the experiences and perceptions of colonisers and how they portrayed and re-interpreted their identities in Afric…

The goal of this book is to place architectural studies, in which people’s interactions with each other and material resources are key, at the crossing of both landscape studies and material culture studies, where it belongs.

Recently, Ingrid Leijten’s book Core Socio-Economic Rights and the European Court of Human Rights was published with Cambridge University Press. The monograph was published in the series Cambridge Studies in European Law and Policy (edited by Laurence Gormley and Jo Shaw) and deals with the protection…

Wrenching poverty, global inequality, violent political and ethnic strife, deadlocked, unresponsive or even collapsing governments, growing dissatisfaction with democracy and missed opportunities for innovation – these are merely some of the challenges of governance and development with which our programme…

Western countries still tend to view Africa as the periphery, says anthropologist Mayke Kaag. In her inaugural lecture, she calls for a shift in perspective: to see Africa as a mirror of global developments.

Promotor: G.A. Persoon, Co-promotor: H.H. de Iongh

Today’s socio-economic challenges aren’t new. In the centuries after the retreat of the Roman state people with different backgrounds and with different ways of life somehow managed to build and maintain a complex economic system in northern Gaul that would produce the ruling dynasties of Europe. By…