LUCIS promotes high-quality research on Islam and Muslim societies and actively communicates the insights and findings of that research to the larger public.

Identifying and explaining change in the structure of central state bureaucracies and the determinants of survival of individual public organizations are two closely related areas of research in public administration. We aim to bridge the gap between these two main strands of studies of organizational…

The Leiden Healthy Society Center is a joint initiative of Leiden University's Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences and Leiden Municipality. The LHSC brings together wide-ranging knowledge, initiatives, and issues related to health and well-being in Leiden, and stimulates and facilitates cooperation…

This dissertation examines how we can reconstruct physical activity by looking at variations in the shape of muscle attachment sites ( ‘entheses’) on the human skeleton. It evaluates two post-medieval contexts; rural Middenbeemster and urban Aalst.

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

Constant Hijzen and Simon Willmetts have released Spies, Culture, and Society, a collection of essays, published by Georgetown University Press, exploring the relationship between intelligence agencies and the societies and cultures they inhabit.

The Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) is one of the few research institutes in the world in which researchers in the field of literature, art, architecture, design and media studies come together to conduct research into the cultural production of the western world, from classical…

Essays in Honour of Olivier P. Nieuwenhuyse

Whether implicitly or explicitly, we all have ideas about how the law is supposed to function, whose interests it should represent, and what role it should play in society. This project explores the ways in which these questions are addressed in the works of the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus…

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 October, the Provincial Executive in Friesland reprimanded four civil servants who had signed an incendiary letter asking the government to adopt a more active climate policy. Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law, feels that the Executive made a mistake.

The Just Peace Dialogues were a set of meetings for public deliberation of key aspects of building peace in today’s world. The dialogues were held across seven days at the heart of the Just Peace Festival (16 - 22 June 2025).

Discover the HAS master at Leiden University – LUMC. Join the Experience Day and student for a day with a mini lecture, case study, and meet students and alumni.

Discover the HAS master at Leiden University – LUMC. Join the Experience Day and student for a day with a mini lecture, case study, and meet students and alumni.

The master’s Health, Ageing and Society is centered around research and innovation for the ageing population. You will be challenged to to innovate and improve the future of our ageing society. Curious to see how this works in practice? Join the upcoming HAS events! We organize student for a day and…

The key subject of the Team Economic and Social History is Inequality (at local, national and global levels). We study this from an intersectional perspective: gender, class, ethnicity or race, religion, sexuality, age, ability/disability, citizenship and legal status. We study these categories of power…

Research by Dutch television programme ‘Nieuwsuur’ shows that local councils in the Netherlands often lack civil servants and experts to support the implementation of the energy transition. As a result, they have become more dependent on commercial consultancy firms.

How can the Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework developed in the SSbD4CheM project facilitate the creation of safer and more sustainable chemicals and materials across various industries?

Jean Monnet is the part of Erasmus+ dedicated to promoting excellence in EU studies in higher education around the world. Jean Monnet Actions aim to build bridges between academics, researchers and EU policymakers. There is an emphasis on the study of and research on EU integration and in understanding…

This edited volume draws from papers presented at the conference Closing the Gap | Responsibility in Cyberspace: Narratives and Practice, organized in June 2022 at the Egmont Palace in Brussels, Belgium, by Leiden University, as part of the EU Cyber Direct project.

This article by Kohei Suzuki and his co-authors examine the relationship between job security, at-will employment, and employee outcomes in the public sector amid growing reforms and politicisation.

Astronomer and Marxist Anton Pannekoek was a remarkable figure. This book aims to study the connections between his life as a socialist theorist and as a pioneering scientist through the prism of Pannekoek's biography.

Through our research, we aim to enhance both scholarly understanding and practical knowledge in sustainability governance, while making meaningful contributions to the public debates on these critical issues. To achieve this goal, we embrace diversity in our research topics, methodological approaches,…

The world we live in is changing in many aspects at an ever-increasing speed. And it will continue to do so. How do we anticipate these changes, such as the increase in atmospheric CO2, the extinction of species and industrialisation?

This book expands on the existing literature on the international dimension of democratization by introducing the concept of democracy projection. Democracy projection is defined as the projection of (democratic) norms through the every-day practice of interactions-beyond any donor-recipient relationship-between…

Terrorism destabilizes governments, undermines civil society, threatens social and economic development, endangers democracy, and directly impacts human rights. The extraordinary events on 9/11 turned counterterrorism into a global governance project. The global collaboration is unprecedented with traditional…

Bert Fraussen, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, Adrià Albareda, a PhD candidate at Leiden University and Caelesta Braun, Associate Professor at Leiden University, identified combinations of consultation tools and analyzed their implications for stakeholder diversity.

The Risk and Regulation Lab is co-directed by:

NIMAR, like other university institutes, shares reliable, high-quality academic knowledge, the product of teaching and research, with society.

On 29 June May 2022 Yujing Tan successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

In this article, James Shires and Tatiana Tropina, assistant professors at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, map the relationship between gender equality and cybersecurity governance as a component of good security sector governance (SSG). Here, it highlights the way in which cybersecurity…

Müller, Braun & Fraussen examine the conditions under which commissioners appear in the news and which communication strategies they pursue.

Stakeholder engagement practices are on the rise in regulatory governance. This raises an important question regarding implications for regulatory legitimacy. Engagement mechanisms are not by default legitimizing: Even when initiated to tap into an array of ‘benevolent’ desiderata, unless carefully…

On December 6th, Bob Schoemaker succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Bob on this great result.

In the light of the fragility of current liberal democracies, this dissertation aims to contribute to rethinking political order by reconstructing Hegel’s account in the Philosophy of Right.

On 29 april 2020, Beth Van Schaack defended her thesis 'Imagining Justice for Syria: Water Always Finds Its Way'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. C. Stahn.

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.

In citizen science projects, citizens and scientists work together to develop new scientific knowledge.

This study offers a new view on public services in the early modern Low Countries and answers the following questions: who provided public facilities in urban communities and in which ways did public amenities change in the period between 1500 and 1800?

How did African actors engage with the idea of Eurafrica?

This article explores how the meaning of the rule of law has evolved over the past century in UK and US parliamentary speeches, focusing on procedural (thin) and substantive (thick) conceptualisations.

The most urgent sustainability challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, and pollution, are complex issues that concern society as a whole. This means that among employers there is a growing demand for graduates who are able to combine both natural scientific and social…