Women Writing Mexico (WWM) is a network of women and men concerned with the human rights crisis in Mexico and more specifically, with the impact of structural forms of poverty, everyday violence, and discrimination based on gender, race, social class, and ethnicity, that particularly have an impact…

This political theory specialisation focuses on the concepts of legitimacy and justice—political philosophy’s core themes. Immersing yourself in theories, philosophical and theoretical methods, and complex cases, you will make the leap from opinion to analysis.

The experiences of ethnic ‘Other’ females have – until recently – been widely overlooked in the study of sport. There continues to be a need to produce critical scholarship about ethnic 'Other' girls and women in sport and physical culture, in order to represent their complex, multifarious and dynamic…

Andrew Littlejohn published the article 'Ruins for the future: Critical allegory and disaster governance in post-tsunami Japan' in American Ethnologist about the ruins left by Japan's 2011 tsunami.

The future of Europe as a community of democratic states is deeply uncertain. The European Union, founded to promote ‘ever closer’ integration, aims nominally for peaceful, prosperous cooperation. But this ideal has been battered by a series of bruising crises, and now by war.

Conference

Academic research on terrorism is getting better all the time. This is the conclusion of university lecturer Bart Schuurman after studying 3,442 articles. He published his study in Terrorism and Political Violence.

Former PhD, Bachelor and Master students of the Van Exter Lab

A mere day after setting foot ashore in the Bahamas on October 13th 1492, Christopher Columbus notes the broad foreheads of the inhabitants of the Americas. These permanently altered cranial shapes are deliberately created through the application of pressure to the head of the infant in the first years…

igraph development focused on improving the most-used interfaces, which are Python, R, and Mathematica. Additionally, the developers aim to make the library and the interfaces easier to maintain, focusing on long-term sustainability. This ensures that igraph continues to be a useful tool for network…

The ERC Consolidator project Food Citizens? Collective food procurement in European cities: solidarity and diversity, skills and scale (2017-2022) organizes Conference Friday 4 February and Winter School 24 January to 4 February 2022.

The focus will be on recent academic research in Literary Studies at the intersection with Digital Humanities. Lectures and interactive workshops will be given by experts in the field.

Rising geopolitical tensions are causing states and national elites to innovate their use of the past for present-day political ends. This is certainly true for the People’s Republic of China, which prepares to celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2024 amid mounting superpower rivalry, ideological tensions…

Russia has been condemned by the International Court of Justice for violating the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, but only minimally. Larissa van den Herik, Professor…

Most families were utterly overwhelmed when they found out that their son or daughter had suddenly left for Syria, that is what Daan Weggemans, Marieke van der Zwan and Marieke Liem observe in their research on family members of Dutch jihadists.

Conference

The English edition of Rijpkema’s Weerbare democratie is published in Routledge’s Extremism and Democracy series, one of the leading series in the field, edited by Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin.

From 2012 onwards the primary scholarly and media focus in regard to foreign fighters has been on the large number of Westerners joining jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq. Yet, much less attention has been paid to another conflict in the ring around Europe that attracted foreign fighters: the Russo-Ukrainian…

This thesis is largely an experimental study on the formation of solid-state simple and complex organic molecules in the H2O-rich and CO-rich ice phases of dense interstellar clouds and dark cores.

This thesis describes the implementation and on-sky demonstration of high-resolution integral-field spectroscopy for extreme adaptive optics systems that are used to find and characterize exoplanets.

Bacteria are highly complex and diverse organisms that have adapted to survive in ecological niches ranging from the most extreme to the most heterogeneous environments.

In this article, Gerrit Dijkstra and Jos Raadschelders from the Institute of Public Administration, focus on Russia’s role in Bosnia and raise some important questions.

Promotor: Prof.dr. M.K. Richardson, Co-Promotor: F. Witte

In the last two decades, there have been heated public and scholarly debates in France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands on the violent end of empire. Nevertheless, the broader comparative investigations into colonial counterinsurgency tend to leave atrocities such as torture, execution, and…

Electron microscopy has become an extremely important techniquein a wide variety of elds.

VVI Research Meetings 2023-2024

Lecture

Conference

On 28 December 2019, Dutch newspaper Trouw published an essay by Constant Hijzen, Assistant Professor Intelligence Studies at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs and the Institute for History. In the essay, he discusses two books on a new genre of espionage: the authors provide access into…

Safety and security risks ranging from cybercrime to terrorism threats are a growing concern worldwide. Technological developments have made security issues increasingly complex. This is typically a topic for the multidisciplinary Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Universities (LDE) curriculum.

Although Islamic State has largely been beaten, for now the Jihad scene in the Netherlands is more than alive. That is what professor Edwin Bakker (terrorism and counterterrorism) recently said in an interview in the Algemeen Dagblad.

How has landscape and land use changed in these two case studies since independence? What has caused these changes, whether anthropogenic or natural? How do local communities in the areas of study perceive these changes? How can community knowledge be integrated with mapping tools (GIS) to contribute…

The "Van Marum Colloquia" are a collaborative lecture series between the LION and LIC institutes, focusing on fundamental and applied surface science.

Researchers are pulled in various, sometimes contradictory directions by the multiplication of performance metrics and new incentives to align with societal needs. Management structures, funding systems, and publication practices are increasingly influenced by pressures to promote only the highest quality…

In what ways can visual art play a vital role in countering the discriminating stigma experienced by transgender communities?

Promotores: G.A. Persoon, H.H. de Iongh

Doctoral research on the history of the critical visitor and their efforts at founding alternative archives including LGBT+-focused, feminist, disability and digitizing projects, resulting in a traveling exhibition on findings (with audio-guides), popular and scholarly article, and a dissertation.

How did toxin genes evolve from harmless physiological genes?

Mining the unusually rich diaries, memoirs, and poems written by Netherlandish Catholics, Judith Pollmann explores how Catholic believers experienced religious and political turmoil in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens.

The place of European states and institutions in world politics is the core focus of this pillar. Research on this theme concerns European actors’ ability to promote peace, security and justice in their neighbourhood and to shape the future of global governance by translating its economic size into…

In the past years access to EU law has been significantly enhanced via services such as EUR-Lex. This development not only allows for easy retrieval of individual legal acts, but for collecting information about the evolution of EU law in the aggregate as well.

Recently, Europe was again shaken by some attacks. This ‘Elementair Deeltje’ places terrorism in a historical perspective and gives an up-to-date overview of this form of political violence.

With both national and international companies operating in the market, the expansion of global platform capitalism raises concerns and critique. To counter a perceived erosion of local authority, various countries, particularly in Europe, have introduced anti-trust legislation against such BigTech…

Cryptocurrencies have exploded onto global financial markets, with the value of a single bitcoin growing from around 800 USD in 2016 to 67,000 USD in 2021.