This UNESCO Chair at CWTS aims to contribute to UNESCO’s agenda to foster diversity and inclusion in science. The chair has two main lines of work:

Dr. Joris Larik, Assistant Professor of Comparative, EU and International Law at LUC The Hague, has co-authored a report entitled 'UN 2.0: Ten Innovations for Global Governance 75 Years beyond San Francisco'.

My research project aims to analyze reasons of the European Union’s (EU) inadequacy to develop a strong Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) with regard to the role of main EU member states, namely Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) and find the answer of how the EU overcome the CSDP question…

The authors examine the efforts towards implementing minimum labor standards in global supply chains through the lens of corporate social responsibility

On Wednesday 24 September 2025 Marija Šerić successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The main aim of this project is to reveal and unravel the invisible histories of the UN, transcending the dominant Western perspective to recover the historical agency of Global South actors. The research will investigate how the UN has both facilitated and limited their role in shaping global order…

This article describes the creation of an app that can help raise climate awareness and the action globally.

This article by Malte Reimann and Antonio Cerella explores how politics and medicine have become deeply intertwined, using the thought of Roberto Esposito to reimagine this relationship through the lens of an affirmative biopolitics.

It is often said that the true character of a person is only revealed in a crisis. In these days, the coronavirus causes concern about the true state of the multilateral system. Political scientist Gisela Hirschmann (Leiden University) is worried about the future of multilateralism.

In Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, fourteen authors—including both world-leading and emerging historians of slavery—engage with the ‘Slaving Zones’ theory.

Which consumer groups post the greatest cost to public health and the planet through their food choices, and how can we use this fine-scale information to accelerate a sustainable dietary transition?

An interdisciplinary and innovative research group combining History, underwater archaeology, GIS and wood provenancing methods.

The authors provide an approach for eliciting population’s preferences in order to calculate weights for use in the optional weighting step in Life Cycle Assessment.

This article discusses the degree of independence that is required for national human rights institutions to function successfully.

The Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) and the Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law (ACMRL) of the VU University Amsterdam organise a public seminar about global migration and refugee law in Egypt and Morocco, focusing on the International Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers…

The objective of this study is to better understand the distribution of microplastics in the environment. More specifically, we will quantify the abundance and distribution of microplastics on beaches.

Dr. Maartje Janse (History) and Prof.dr. Gert Oostindie (History, KITLV) have been awarded a seed grant for:

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of China's global resurgence and its effects on U.S. dominance.

Joris Larik, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, wrote about the topics of the Brexit, the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement, and Global Treaty (Re-)Negotiations.

Beyond Empires explores the complexity of empire building from the point of view of self-organized networks, rather than from the point of view of the central state.

This book examines the history of The Netherlands in a way that connects global processes to local developments.

The World Politics Major at Leiden University College The Hague examines the big ideas and the powerful forces – political, military, economic, social and cultural – that shape the world at every level, from the global to the local and everything in between. Political conflict is a key driver of many…

Mycorrhizas are symbiotic associations between soil fungi and most plant species.

Today, humanity produces sufficient calories, in theory, to feed the 7.7 billion people on the planet: the amount of food produced per person on the planet has gone up more than 40% since the 1960s. Yet, ironically, the prevalence of undernourishment – which had been declining for decades – has started…

On 28 June 2018, Qiuyin Hu defended his doctoral thesis 'Regulating Working Conditions in Times of Globalization'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof.dr. G.J.J. Heerma van Voss and Prof. dr. B. Barentsen.

Today, globalization makes us all aware of how closely we are connected to, and often dependent upon, the actions of people who are distant from us. Human migration and economic liberalization have confronted local communities with changes happening on a global level. How can we devise ways to share…

Ending the United Kingdom’s (UK) forty-seven year European Union (EU) membership has fundamentally transformed its relationship with the EU. After years of tumultuous negotiations, international law now once again governs the UK’s relationship with the EU. This has resulted in a sophisticated body of…

Home to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, The Hague is the perfect backdrop to explore conceptions of justice in our global society. Questions of human rights, peace, security and the environment present legal and policy challenges for governmental and non-governmental…

Assessing the feasibility and legitimacy of the current model of global tax governance and the role of the OECD and EU in international tax law-making.

Are there general principles or values that should govern our actions as moral agents and/or as political subjects?

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…

In this article, Marieke Liem and Kim Moeller revisit Goldstein’s framework on the drugs-violence nexus

Agriculture is among the most vulnerable sectors to climate change and poorer countries face the most severe difficulties. Coffee farmers in Central America, for instance, are facing multiple and mutually reinforcing crises, including price shocks, outbreaks of pests and diseases, migration, and farm…

A common method to solve expensive function evaluation problem is using Bayesian Global Optimization, instead of Evolutionary Algorithms.

What is the role of local Caribbean individuals and communities in creating and perpetuating archaeological heritage? How has archaeological knowledge been integrated into education plans in different countries?

The global agri-food system plays a critical role in food security and environmental issues.

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.

How do educational philosophies, discourses and practices spread around the globe, and how are they transformed and adapted locally?

Together with two other authors, Jaroslaw Kantorowicz from ISGA investigates the susceptibility to believing in misinformation.

Massive science communication projects should be based on strong and relevant science cases. They should engage with a large number of stakeholders, not only in research, academia, policy, funding and governance but also in less traditional communities, such as the arts field. This is the outcome of…

On 10 November Guanmian Xu successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

At the start of the 20th century there were fewer than 2 billion people. Now at over 7 billion, Earth’s population is on target to reach 8 billion by 2027. How has this dramatic increase in human population impacted Earth’s life support systems and natural resources? How should we understand the meaning…

Buitelaar argues that IOs micro-level discourse adapts imperfectly to macro-level changes, balancing adaptation to pressures with commitment to values.

Although official law generally conceives of personal injury victims as individual rights holders, the actual experience of physical injury and its consequences is relational. Indeed, many researchers in the global North as well as the global South have contended that the very concept of the Self should…

In light of climate change, it is crucial to determine whether plant species can adapt to future climates to avoid extinction. Plants adapt to various conditions by altering their functional traits, such as leaf size or photosynthetic rate. Some traits appear linked and vary together between species,…

A thorough description of the relationships among languages and their social environment in a given context, reflecting an ecological perspective, involves attention to the agency of local actors, and the policies, discourse, and ideologies that surround them.