An interdisciplinary collection of the best international scholarship on Muslim youth.

Muhammad Adlin Sila examines the range of ways Bima Muslims constitute their Islamic identities and agencies through rituals and festivals. In response to their surroundings, what it means to be a Muslim is constantly being negotiated.

On young Muslims seeking to understand their place and make their way in a transformed world.

The World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official

How did institutions and structures operate throughout the Muslim world from the earliest history of Islam into the early modern period?

Scholars have long debated the intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East. Some claim the organization supports terrorism, while others believe it is a positive force for democratization.

With regard to governance, policies and law, many Muslims and Muslim countries recognise the possibility that Islam has something important to say about the way society is to be ordered, governed, and regulated.

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

This summer school is for graduate (MA and PhD) students and researchers who have an interest in handwritten materials, editing, and the tradition of editing in the Muslim world. It offers theoretical lectures as well as hands-on practice with samples from the world-famous collections of the Leiden…

How have Muslims imagined the world before Muhammad? Stories about pre-Islamic times feature across all genres and periods of Arabic literature, and while many writers have derided the pre-Islamic past as disorderly paganism, others celebrate its memory as a time of Arab nobility and fine literature.…

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.

On Thursday 28 March 2024 Said Reza Huseini successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This article presents the findings of an explanatory study into the perceptions of Dutch Muslims in The Hague concerning pre-emptive counter-extremism and de-radicalisation policies.

What forms does religiosity take among Muslims in Europe today? How are answers to the question of what it means to be a Muslim in Europe reached in institutions of Islamic higher education, Muslim student organizations, and women’s organizations? What is the relation between the individual and religious…

What made the early Islamic empire so successful and have we missed the story by neglecting crucial evidence? The 7th-century Arab conquests changed the socio-political configurations in the Mediterranean and Eurasia forever. Yet we do not really know how the Arabs managed to gain dominance of this…

Migration imposes special pressures on the meaning, experience and organization of lifecycle rituals. These pressures are felt most strongly by Muslim migrants to Western Europe. In this innovative study, Nathal M. Dessing examines the effects of migration on the life cycle rituals of Moroccan, Turkish…

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…

The project 'EmbRace: The Embodiment of Racialization: Running Muslim Women and the Sense of Non-Belonging' investigates the embodied and sensorial dimension of the racialization of Muslims and its intersections with gender, class and religion.

The Cinematic Santri explores the rise and course over the last ten years of cinematic practices among a younger generation of NU associates (Nahdlatul Ulama), the largest traditionalist Muslim group in Indonesia and elsewhere.

Anthropology of Law in Muslim Sudan analyses the hybridity of law systems and the plurality of legal practices in rural and urban contexts of contemporary Sudan, shedding light on the complex relation between Islam and society.

Mr. Sujadi defended his thesis on 29 June 2017

On 18 May 2022, Annelien Bouland defended her thesis 'Please give me my divorce: an ethnography of Muslim women and the law in Senegal'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof.dr. J.M. Otto, Prof.dr. M.M.A. Kaag and Dr.ir. C.I.M. Jacobs.

Ömer Gürlesin defended his thesis on 28 November 2018

The eleven innovative essays in this volume explore the notion that all forms of modern mass politics, including liberal democracies, need such a form of sacralization of politics to function.

Political scientist Luzia Helfer (Leiden University) empirically tested claims about media-politics relatiopns using unique data from experimental studies with elected politicians and political journalists in Switzerland and the Netherlands.

In the Special Issue of Matatu: “Power to the People?” Patronage, Intervention and Transformation in African Performative Artspaper, Annachiara Raia seeks to investigate the manifold relationships between traditional and contemporary, oral and written Swahili poetry, in the utendi and mashairi forms…

The Indonesian Experience after the Fall of Suharto

Some conflicts involve many Muslims as foreign fighters; other conflicts attract only relatively few combatants from abroad. Isabele Duvesteyn and Bram Peeters

Many of the big challenges of the 21st century (climate change, international migration, financial instability, socio-economic inequality) find their origins in the organisation of the global economy. Any solution to the world’s big challenges therefore requires forceful policy interventions at the…

Latif Fauzi defended his thesis on 18 May 2021.

The research group Politics, Culture and National Identities 1789-present investigates a wide range of national political cultures in Europe and the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead of only analyzing high politics (the acts of governments and political parties), the research group focuses…

The Leiden Political Economy Group (L-PEG) is a multi-disciplinary network of scholars with a research interest in (comparative / global) political economy based at Leiden University. Our members belong to various institutes and faculties across Leiden University, and from other universities across…

Political scientist Matthew Longo (Leiden University) takes a detailed look at the evolution of border security in the United States after 9/11. Far from the walls and fences that dominate the news, he reveals borders to be thick, multi-faceted and binational institutions that have evolved greatly in…

The Leiden Lectures in Media | Art | Politics (MAP) is a series of talks organized by Pepita Hesselberth and Yasco Horsman. Speakers from various academic backgrounds and in different stages of their careers reflect on diverging ways in which technological and social changes challenge and transform…

Political scientist Maurits de Jongh (Leiden University/Sciences Po) argues that political liberalism is self-defeating as a framework of justification for liberal conceptions of justice. He explores how the framework's self-imposed criterion of acceptability in the eyes of all reasonable citizens leads…

Why obey the state? Dorota Mokrosińska presents a fresh analysis of the most influential theories of political obligation and develops a novel approach to this foundational problem of political philosophy, an intriguing combination of the elements of natural duty and associative theories.

How did parties as political organizations emerge?

This dissertation offers a reconstruction of the propositional contents of the writings of Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt while bringing these into discussion with their performative meanings, such as polemical forms of reasoning, analogical and metaphorical uses of language, and hidden…

Politics is about the authorised allocation of values: who gets what, when and how much? This question is relevant at many different levels, in many different places and in very different ways.

Understanding the evolving landscape of extremism in the 21st century.

Under what circumstances do paramilitary groups limit their use of political violence? This article examines the use of political violence by the PIRA.

The Institute of Political Science is a vibrant department with nearly 70 academic staff in Leiden and nearby The Hague.

Profile Area Political Legitimacy, Leiden University

We are very happy to welcome you to spend the fall semester, spring semester or full academic year studying with us at the Institute of Political Science Leiden or campus The Hague. Here you will find practical information as an exchange student.

In what ways do historical and current events affect how we should judge the legitimacy of political authorities?

Are you thinking about studying Political Science? Watch the introduction video’s and learn more!

Both play and politics have the potential to create worlds in which new rules apply, meanings are created, and possibilities emerge for collaboration, strategy and creative solutions. In this sense, play and politics have always been very much alike. But what happens to this kinship in a post-digital…

This volume challenges the idea that the development of ‘democracy’ is a story of rise and progress at all. It is rather a story of continuous but never completely satisfying attempts of interpreting the rule of the people.

Hegemony and World Order explores a key question for our tumultuous times of multiple global crises.