Opportunities, challenges, and future perspectives of people-centered approaches in dynamic historic urban landscapes

How geographical and institutional openness in Dutch Guiana fostered a unique colonial economy. This publication is part of the Early American Places Series.

This project will construct an inventory of possible conceptions of the resistance of the world to scientists’ claims and theories.

Holtz defended her dissertation ‘Collective human rights as an (onto)logical solution to climate change: reconceptualizing, applying and proceduralizing an overlooked category of human rights’ on 16 October 2025. The doctoral research was supervised by Carsten Stahn and Daniëlla Dam-de Jong.

Did you know that Arabic was for centuries the lingua franca in an area stretching from the south of Spain to the Chinese border? And that the Middle East under Muslim rule was the world’s beating heart of trade, but also of science and scholarship?

On Tuesday 23 May 2017, Jasmina Mackic defended her doctoral thesis ‘Proving discriminatory violence at the European Court of Human Rights’. The supervisor of the research is Vice Dean and Professor of Public International Law Larissa van den Herik. A brief summary of her thesis is provided below.

The multiple connections between emblematics and Natural History in the broader perspective of their underlying artistic, literary, political and religious ideologies.

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

Religion is everywhere. Knowledge of religion is essential for anyone who wants to understand the world. Are you fascinated by the diversity of religions, their development throughout history and their meaning today?

The latest newsletter of the Master of Laws Programme: Advanced Studies in International Children's Rights and the UNICEF Chair in Children's Rights of Leiden Law School, Department of Child Law has been published.

Kim Stroet is examining how the interaction between teachers and pupils influences pupils’ motivation. ‘Children need to have the feeling that they are in control of their own learning process.’

A new website has been designed to make the Leiden Children’s Rights Observatory, which started in 2018, more accessible.

To what extent are the rights to street children violated en how can their rights be protected?

On 30 May, Gert Jan Boeve defended the thesis 'The general right of suspension'. The doctoral research was supervised by Bart Krans and Alex Geert Castermans.

In this paper, Sibgatullina and Abbas aim to illuminate the complex connections between the European right-wing movements and Islam and discusses how the adoption of Muslim identity may function as a politically strategic opportunity for European conservative forces.

In Women and Property Rights in Indonesian Islamic Contexts, eight scholars of Indonesian Islam examine women’s access to property in law courts and in village settings.

Studying change in the course of human history, in different places, through the lens of a diverse set of core themes; World History for International Studies offers readers a set of windows into different debates historians have been conducting.

In this course, we will focus on the fascinating history of the Arabic Medieval World. We will take you on a journey through the Middle Ages. All along, we will present you with historiographical debates and dilemmas and travel back and forth in time explaining to you how events of the past affected…

The action plan focuses on addressing key challenges posed by technological developments and trends in biomedical practices

This seminal volume covers the entire global history of urbanization since the rise of cities in Mesopotamia in the 6th millennium BC. Leiden historians Wim Blockmans, Leonard Blussé, Luuk de Ligt and Leo Lucassen contributed survey and thematic chapters.

On the 24th of March, Prof. Ton Liefaard gave a lecture at the Girne American University entitled ‘International Children’s Rights: Achievements and Challenges’.

How was the future United Nations Organization promoted to global publics during WW II?

From 2 to 17 January, Leiden University co-organised an interdisciplinary course on children’s rights, that took place at the Centre for Studies on Justice and Society at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Stichting Migratierecht Nederland and the Europa Institute of Leiden University are jointly organising the conference ‘Children’s Rights and Migration’ that will take place in Leiden on 26 January 2023. Researchers, lawyers, judges, policy makers and other professionals from migration legal practice…

On Friday 23 November 2018 the Institute of Immigration Law and the Department of Child Law (both Leiden University) will organize an international conference on ‘Safeguarding children’s rights in immigration law’ at Leiden Law School.

In December 2024, the book Redressing Fundamental Rights Violations by the EU: The Promise of the ‘Complete System of Remedies', edited by Melanie Fink, was published fully open access with Cambridge University Press. The EU prides itself on having created a legal system that puts the individual at…

Over the last three decades, the discovery of exoplanets has revealed the boundless variety of worlds beyond our own Solar System⁠. Majority of planetary systems contain short-period planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune⁠.

French is a global language. It is spoken on every continent and serves as an official language for many international organisations (NATO, UN, WHO). In this minor, you improve your language skills, study French from a linguistic perspective, and immerse yourself in the rich global Francophone culture…

One of the three long-term research interests of our group concerns the Transformation of the Roman World (c AD 450-900).

The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities differs markedly from other forms of international human rights law: it not only protects the rights of individuals but also addresses interpersonal relations and social structures. How did the convention attain this broad…

A new Special Issue with Transnational Legal Theory edited by Jelena Belic, Matthew Canfield, Henning Lahmann, Rachel Griffin, and Barrie Sander, brings together a collective of perspectives to unpack the promise and perils of human rights as a vocabulary for governing digital platforms.

From March 28 to 31 twelve student teams from different countries visited Leiden to participate in the second edition of the Children’s Rights Moot Court. They were invited to plead an interesting and challenging immigration law case.

Almost three years after receiving her honorary doctorate, Dr Graça Machel returned to Leiden University. Over the course of two days she spoke with students, researchers, and other interested persons, about human rights – particularly those of women and children – in a world in which these are continually…

Social Information Processing in Children with and without Hearing Loss

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 PhD project, we focus on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of LMs with narrative data.

Dividing Worlds: Tsunamis, Seawalls, and Ontological Politics in Northeast Japan

Addressing the core novel objective of scalably assessing the impact of possible interventions through counterfactual prediction based on spatio-temporal data.

A remarkable population of short period transiting rocky exoplanets with equilibrium temperatures on the order of 2,000 K has recently been discovered.

In this article, Barrie Sander, Assistant Professor of International Law, elaborates some of the risks that arise from relying on AI technologies to address climate change and explores the extent to which human rights law may be harnessed to address such risks through three registers of human rights…

Large numbers of children all over the world face significant health risks, such as infectious and chronic diseases, malnutrition, injuries and the consequences of natural disasters, protracted armed conflicts and poverty.

On 21 Januari 2020, Patrick van Berlo defended his thesis 'Human Rights Elephants in an Era of Globalisation: Commodification, Crimmigration, and Human Rights in Confinement'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. J.P. van der Leun and Prof. M.A.H. van der Woude.

A project aimed at understanding the complicated process of religious transformation in one of the centres of the early Muslim world.

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

The study ‘From Law to Practice: Towards a Roadmap to Strengthen Children’s Rights in the Era of Biomedicine’ written by experts from Leiden Law School and submitted to the Council of Europe’s Committee on Bioethics is now available online.

Which challenges exist for girls to effectuate their right to education and specifically getting access to education?

If we want to solve global problems, we need to know about both the theory and the practice. How does the international community make decisions about military intervention, for instance? Why is it such a complex process? Professor Herman Schaper has represented the Netherlands at the United Nations…