What makes some international organisations more likely to succumb to crises where others manage to survive or even thrive? And what can international organisations do to become resilient and withstand existential challenges? Political Scientist Gisela Hirschmann (Leiden University) studied the example…

This book questions the accepted origins of the field of International Relations (IR). Commonly understood to have emerged from the horrors of WW1 with the goal of bringing about world peace, the authors argue that on the contrary, IR came from a somewhat less noble tradition – that of the Round Tab…

Understanding the complexities of world affairs requires an ability to think critically and to draw insights from a variety of perspectives, sources, and analytic frames. Leiden University’s Master of Arts in International Relations addresses these needs through distinctive humanities-based training…

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, integrating debates about Roman urban space with discourse on Roman urban history.

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels.

The International Criminal Court’s response to contestation by African states parties

This volume examines how the history of the humanities might be written through the prism of scholarly personae, understood as time- and place-specific models of being a scholar.

What does it mean to live in an era of ‘posts’? At a time when ‘post-truth’ is on everyone’s lips, this volume seeks to uncover the logic of post-constructions – postmodernism, post-secularism, postfeminism, post-colonialism, post-capitalism, post-structuralism, post-humanism, post-tradition, post-Christian,…

Are you thinking about studying Arts and Culture: Art History and Museum Studies? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

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

This study aims to provide a long time perspective of human landscape manipulation. Studying the roles of prehistoric foragers in past ecosystems is of great importance to establish the character of past 'natural' landscapes and to enhance the management of current ones.

Which plants in the Mediterranean garden were already known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and how were they utilized?

This project investigates the rich linguistic history of the crucial language groups in East Africa and includes a search for words that indicate earlier lost languages. These outcomes, combined with recent archaeological and genetic research, will contribute to a new understanding of East Africa’s…

How do commissions of inquiry operating in conflict situations utilize international law, and how can inquiry findings be utilized by other bodies belonging to the international legal community?

Research in the International Relations and European Studies Team addresses the interconnections and interdependence of contemporary global political, economic and cultural affairs from a multidisciplinary perspective rooted in the humanities.

For both Dutch and international students, a Humanities degree provides a strong foundation for a career that crosses borders.

Speeches and speech acts have been crucial in settling the question at the centre of every political debate: who gets what, when and where?

Surreal Geographies recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Examining art, literature, and film produced from the immediate postwar period up to the present moment, Kathryn L. Brackney investigates changing portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors.

In A History of Plague in Java, 1911–1942, Maurits Bastiaan Meerwijk demonstrates how the official response to the 1911 outbreak of plague in Malang led to one of the most invasive health interventions in Dutch colonial Indonesia.

At a time of urgent threats to both the planet and multilateralism, Brian McGarry (Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies) has published a new volume on the past and future of international environmental law.

Are you thinking about studying International Relations? Learn more about the programme and watch the general introduction video.

International partnerships in which Leiden University participates.

This PhD dissertation examines international responsibility for the crime of aggression from a public international law perspective. Under customary international law, as well as the amendments to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted in the Review Conference in Kampala in 2010,…

It recently emerged that a Swiss firm secretly owned by the CIA and the West German intelligence service BND had been selling manipulated coding equipment to numerous governments, including allies, to spy on them through a Swiss cover firm for years.