On Friday 23 November 2018 Professor W. (Willemien) den Ouden and Professor J.E. (Jacobine) van den Brink acted as keynote speakers at a conference entitled Private Enforcement of European Competition and State Aid Law: Current challenges and the way forward.

On 10 May Maarten Aalbers, PhD-fellow and research staff member at the Europa Institute, participated in the “State Aid Compliance Seminar”, hosted by Europa decentraal, the EU law center for local and regional authorities in the Netherlands. Maarten Aalbers presented on the interaction between EU competition…

In the upcoming Dutch general elections, the focus of the party campaigns is on national issues. Luuk van Middelaar, Professor of Foundations and Practice of the European Union and its Institutions, argues in a column in Dutch newspaper NRC that foreign policy should also be on the agenda.

The emergence of the Köprülü household that imprinted its stamp on the latter half of the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire. What is the power struggle they carried out against Ottoman dynastic power?

In this article Vanessa Newby discusses how the ANZUS states of United States, Australia, and New Zealand that sit on the fringes of the Asia-Pacific, are increasingly using their armed forces to deliver Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Response (HADR) as a way of engaging with the region.

In this blog post, Paweł Surowiec and Ilan Manor draw on insights from their edited volume Public Diplomacy and the Politics of Uncertainty.

One way for governments to conduct foreign policy and promote national interests is through direct outreach and communication with the population of a foreign country. This is called public diplomacy. Historians such as Helmer Helmers and William T. Rossiter have shown that printed media were already…

In this article, Yannick Veilleux-Lepage and Tommy van Steen, assistant professors at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, discuss the degree of consensus within the field of terrorism studies regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the activities of violent non-state actors.

How and to what extent does AI affect citizen representation in public service delivery and state-citizen interactions?

Both Europe and Latin America face challenges globally and at home. Conflicts over land and resources have been resurgent in recent years.

Opera, more so perhaps than most other forms of art, is deeply intertwined with philosophy and politics. For some composers this was explicitly so. Think of Wagner’s relation with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer or Verdi’s role in Italian unification. But almost any opera raises, and tries to grapple with,…

From fake news to COVID-19 conspiracies, debates about truth claims have become more prominent during the past decade. Taking a global, comparative perspective, the minor Disinformation and Strategic Communication in Global Media focuses on the broad spectrum of contested narratives subsumed under the…

The debate on tax evasion by multinationals is in full swing in many Member States. Last week it was announced that the European Commission has started an investigation into possible illegal State aid from the Netherlands to Nike. It is likely that dozens of other companies are getting away with it.

Monday 5 September 2016, the political science bachelor’s and master’s programmes kick off. We are looking forward to meeting our new students. And we will happily help them to find their way around.

Hoye proposes that concerns about virtues of the sovereign are essential for understanding Hobbes's both his political thinking and his political critique.

From 26 to 30 June 2017 a summer course on Europeanisation of administrative law in the Member States of the European Union will be held by the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law.

According to Brussels, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has systematically been dismantling the rule of law in Hungary since 2010. In a final attempt to do something about this, the EU wants to make payment of subsidies dependent on respect for the rule of law.

Elsevier Weekblad has chosen 30 Dutch talents under the age of 30. They include Leiden alumni Mátyás Bittenbinder (biology), Hielke Onnink, (Public Sector Management) and Baris Koca (law).

New policies, institutional configurations, and state-market relations are emerging outside of East Asia, as new developmental states move beyond the historical experience of East Asian development. Yet, the ‘developmental state’ is still relevant. This book, edited by Jewellord Nem Singh (Institute…

Political Islam is not new to the Middle East, but the appearance of ISIS has stretched the phenomenon to the extreme.

The transformation of the myriad of medieval kingdoms, principalities, local lordships, city-‘states’ and peasant ‘republics’ into ‘modern’ states, claiming some measure of sovereignty, remains one of the core themes of European history, because it gets down to the very root of the (idea on the) Europe…

This dissertation focuses on investigating the public communication around quantum science and technology that may affect public engagement.

This book presents an introductory survey of the major themes, thinkers and texts, philosophical genres and profound insights of the Chinese philosophical tradition. Its coverage ranges from the foundational history of Chinese thought in the 6th–5th centuries BCE up to the present day.

On Thursday 12 October 2017 Janneke Wesseling will give a lecture as part of the Studium Generale Programme at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).

The future of Europe as a community of democratic states is deeply uncertain. The European Union, founded to promote ‘ever closer’ integration, aims nominally for peaceful, prosperous cooperation. But this ideal has been battered by a series of bruising crises, and now by war.

This study investigates how the tenure of security (proxied by both inter- and intra-party electoral advantage) affects the engagement and political performance of members of parliament.

Xinrong Ma defended her thesis on 13 February 2018

This book brings together contributions on topics related to the Dutch EU Presidency Agenda 2016 from a number of scholars who are affiliated with Leiden University.

On 6 April the Netherlands will vote on far-reaching cooperation with Ukraine. Referenda are exceptional in Dutch political history, according to Professor of Electoral Research Joop van Holsteijn.

The word bureaucracy does not have negative connotations for Ken Meier. Meier, Professor of Bureaucracy and Democracy, has a clear grasp of the relationship between elected politicians and bureaucracy, or the civil service. Inaugural lecture on Monday 20 May.

On 22 May, the Dutch House of Representatives invited one hundred citizens to pose critical questions regarding the Ministries’ annual reports. This followed on from the annual ‘Accountability Day’. Caspar van den Berg, Associate Professor of Public Administration, helped think about how citizens could…

In September 2017 the Institute of Political Science (Leiden University) will launch a new bachelor’s programme: International Relations and Organisations (IRO). It will taught in English and be based in the city of The Hague. The three-year IRO programme is aimed at international, as well as internationally-oriented…

On Wednesday 27 September a new book by Prof. Luuk van Middelaar will appear, entitled The new politics of Europe. Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s first vice-president, presents the book that evening during a symposium around the same theme.

The first results of the “Policing European Metropolises project” (PEMP) that associate Professor Elke Devroe and Professor P. Ponsaers launched in April 2013 are now published. Having been the referent for The Netherlands and Belgium in the Urbis project (Leonardo programme), the project focuses on…

It is often claimed that social media can contribute to democratic decision-making by bringing politicians and citizens into dialogue with one another. But is this potential always realised, and how? Most researchers look at politicians and their online communication strategies. In this New Media &…

It is difficult to hold international organisations (IOs) accountable for human rights violations. Gisela Hirschmann (Institute of Political Science, Leiden University) introduces the concept of pluralist accountability, whereby third parties set the standards for IOs’ actions in relation to human rights,…

Following the fall of the fourth Rutte cabinet, Dutch Minister of Justice and Security Dilan Yesilgöz addressed the Dutch media about the ‘influx’ of family reunification applications by asylum permit holders. In her view, it would put enormous pressure on Dutch society and could jeopardise security.…

According to Afshin Ellian, Professor of Jurisprudence, the new Iran starts with a referendum. In WNL’s ‘Goedemorgen Nederland’ programme, he says: ‘You’ll need to build a wall around Iran's constitutional future.’