News & Events

Leiden University launched an Africa Strategy at the beginning of 2016, connecting all Africanists in Leiden, and also connecting them to knowledge centres in Africa and to other Africa-oriented knowledge centres in the Netherlands. A delegation of Leiden University visited South Africa and Mozambique 14-22 April. Existing relationships were strengthened, new ones explored. 

With a mixture of pride and sadness we announce that the last book by our late colleague Stephen Ellis has just been published: This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organised Crime. Nigerians have acquired an unfortunate reputation for involvement in drug-trafficking, fraud, cyber-crime and other types of criminal activity. Successful Nigerian criminal networks have a global reach, interacting with their Italian, Latin American and Russian counterparts. The book describes Nigerian organised crime from its origins in the last years of colonial rule, to the moment it went global.

Since the end of the Suharto regime in 1998, Indonesia has been increasingly confident of its abilities in the international system. As the largest economy in Southeast Asia and with the fourth largest population in the world, with over 255 million people in 2015, Indonesia has increasingly made its voice heard, in particular in issues connected to the Global South. Read the new Infosheet.