Sofia Ranchordas (1985) has been appointed Chair European and Comparative Public Law and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen. She will start this position on October 1st.

The presence and participation of interest groups in policymaking processes has become a crucial component of Western democracies. These groups link society and policymakers and influence public policy choices. Their function however, is often taken for granted and not very well researched. Adrià Albareda…

National parochialism is the tendency to cooperate more with ingroup than outgroup members. Angelo Romano, Matthias Sutter, James Liu, Toshio Yamagishi & Daniel Balliet studied national parochialism across different nations and conclude in their publication in Nature Communications that it is a ubiquitous…

Amidst concerns over what the re-election of Donald Trump will mean for the international system, Prof. Dr. Jan Aart Scholte gave a Cleveringa Lecture titled ‘Trump, geopolitics and the future of globalization’ on 28 November 2024.

The World of the Fullo takes a detailed look at the fullers, craftsmen who dealt with high-quality garments, of Roman Italy. Analyzing the social and economic worlds in which the fullers lived and worked, it tells the story of their economic circumstances, the way they organized their workshops, the…

A look into the political history of collecting and the collections of Andean mummies in Western European museums from 1830-1930 through archaeology and paleoimaging.

A portrait of the complex historical process of over 500 years of European colonialism in the New World.

Research on this theme concerns Europe’s position in global markets, its response to the emergence of new international trade and financial actors that challenge institutions where Europe has long had considerable influence.

Archaeologist Quentin Bourgeois received an NWO Vidi grant to investigate the emergence of a pan-European culture in the third millennium BC. ‘We see ideas being shared across the entire continent in pre-literate societies. And not only that, for a thousand years, the same cultural ideas persist.’

On 20 June 2025, Melanie Fink presented her research on ‘Robo Swarms and Polygraphs: The Future of European Border Management and its Human Costs’ at the Research Workshop on ‘Migration law at the intersection of international, EU and domestic law: institutional structures and the protection of human…

How can we understand the implementation of EU policy and what challenges are involved?

Amidst concerns over what the re-election of Donald Trump will mean for the international system, Prof. Dr. Jan Aart Scholte will give a Cleveringa Lecture titled ‘Trump, geopolitics and the future of globalization’ on 28 November 2024.

In an essay published in three prominent European newspapers, Professor Luuk van Middelaar takes a close look at Europe’s role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. ‘Europe shows plenty of political energy, but what is still lacking is strategic cool-headedness, in facing a nuclear power.’

International law experts have voiced concerns about the recent attack on Iran. Legal philosopher Andreas Kinneging expressed a different perspective in an interview with ‘Trouw’ newspaper: 'In times of crisis, the best in people comes out.'

World history, connectivity and material culture, edited by Martin Pitts and Miguel John Versluys. From Cambridge University Press.

The Centre for the History of European Integration (CHEI) is an initiative that brings together scholars working on European integration, broadly conceived, from a historical perspective.

Was the progressive colonial civil servant the precursor of the postcolonial development-aid worker?

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

What political factors affect the speed or duration of EU legislative decision-making?

International Relations and European Politics is one of the three organisational clusters of the Institute of Political Science.

Set up in 1991, this unique project aims to identify and describe the common lexical heritage of the most important Indo-European languages and language branches. The project has thus far resulted in twelve volumes published as The Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series (Brill, Leiden).

On 9 February students of the Master in European Law visited the new headquarters of Eurojust, one of the EU’s agencies for judicial cooperation in criminal matters based in The Hague.

Pita Limjaroenrat (45) was set to become Thailand’s next prime minister, but in 2024 the Thai Constitutional Court dissolved his progressive Move Forward Party and banned him from politics. He now reflects publicly on the policy values that brought the party to prominence.

In this article, Seda Gürkan, Özlem Atikcan and George Christou examine how EU institutions responded to Turkey’s democratic decline between 2014 and 2024, analysing how conditionality was framed and applied by the European Commission, European Parliament and European Council.

On 18 June 2019, Peter Kempees defended his thesis 'Hard power and the European Convention on Human Rights'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. R.A. Lawson and Prof. H. Duffy.

Eva Michaels & Monika Sus examines European Strategic Autonomy (ESA) as the EU’s response to the fragmentation of the Liberal International Order.

Geopolitical events affect Europe un a myriad of ways far beyond trade and defence. They also impact areas such as the environment, migration, technology, EU enlargement, multilateralism, and the rules-based international order more generally. Three GTGC researchers participated in a panel discussion…

The new project INFLANET will train young scientists in Europe to become experts in inflammation research. Professor Annemarie Meijer from the Institute of Biology Leiden coordinates the training.

EUROTYPES is a research project developed by political scientist Adina Akbik, for which she recently received a European Research Council Starting Grant. Her aim is to examine the impact of cultural stereotypes in European multi-level policy enforcement. One of EUROTYPES' innovations lies in its focus.…

Until recently, the role of external information processing in intelligence has rarely been investigated quantitatively or experimentally. A group of researchers from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Leiden University, GGZ Rivierduinen, and University of Edinburgh measured in a new way how and when people…

Does a shared idea of the ‘public servant’ exist in Europe? Sager, Overeem, and others explore.

On Wednesday 19 and Thursday 20 April 2023, the Foundation Bob Wessels Insolvency Law Collection (BWILC) organised its fifth PhD Workshop on European and International Insolvency Law.

Our research deals with the deep history of Europe and Eurasia, from the inception of farming up until the beginning of the Roman Period. This was a period in which key developments took place that had a profound impact on European landscapes and society until the present day. Our research and teaching…

Leiden’s Institute for History has an exceptionally strong expertise in premodern European history in its global context, with specialists whose interests cover virtually the whole continent. We have a strong track record in leading larger research teams and work together with colleagues across Europe…

This paper, written by Silvia D'Amato & Andrea Terlizzi, investigates the extent to which the European Union is strategically engaging against terrorism.

The corona crisis is also a disinformation crisis for the global community in general, and for the European Union (EU) in particular. What is less clear is how adequate the EU’s response to the ‘infodemic’ has been. This essay exposes the dangers of disinformation for the EU, which have intensified…

Akbik and Diessner expand the classic typology of police-patrol and fire-alarm oversight with two new categories: planning bureaus and ambulance chasers.

The project Advancing The European Multilingual Experience (AThEME) studied multilingualism in Europe by incorporating and combining linguistic, cognitive and sociological perspectives.

On 10 July 2020, the final of the European Law Moot Court Competition took place online before an impressive line-up of academics and practitioners of EU law.

This paper develops a novel theoretical framework for the conduct of postmortems after major foreign policy surprises for the European Union and its member states.

This paper explores whether multilateral surveillance and policy coordination under the ES was based on a path-changing or a path-dependent mechanism