News & Events
Find the latest news below, and our event calendar on the right.
Would you like to stay updated on our latest research news, publications and events? Please subscribe to our monthly newsletter!
Posted on 9 November 2011, last modified on 9 October 2023
11 October 2021
Digital communication is assumed to have a severe impact both on how conflicts develop and how they are being mediated. There is, however, a need for more evidence on the role of digital media in regions of conflict. Addressing this challenge, the key goal of the DDMAC project is to gather empirical evidence defining and demonstrating the use, spread, content, and agenda-setting role of social media in regions of conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa. Read more about the project.
08 October 2021
08 October 2021
Jan-Bart Gewald, Professor of African History at Leiden University, has been selected as a fellow at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) for the second semester of 2022. He will be working on the research project 'The "Big Hole", Kimberley South Africa, 1870-1920'. The chance find of a diamond on a small hillock in South Africa one hundred and fifty years ago initiated an industrial mining revolution, the effects of which continue to reverberate far into the future.
08 October 2021
On 7 October 2021, Tanzanian novelist and university teacher Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2021 'for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents'. Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar. He arrived in England as a refugee in the end of the 1960s. He is the focus of our latest Library Weekly!
ASCL Seminar: Imagining the world - Swahili-language print media in early twentieth-century Tanzania
01 October 2021
Global histories of East Africa have often focused on economic relationships. But engagement with the wider world also took place in the domain of ideas, increasingly, from the late 19th century, through the medium of print media. On 11 November, Prof. Emma Hunter (University of Edinburgh) will explore Tanzania’s Swahili-language print media as a space in which writers reflected on their place within an increasingly unequal world, in an online ASCL Seminar.
29 September 2021
Knowledge about religion and spirituality is essential in dealing with migrants of West African descent in the Netherlands who may be victims of human trafficking. This is the main conclusion of a study conducted by the Centre against Child and Human Trafficking (CKM), the African Studies Centre Leiden, and the University of Humanistic Studies. A culture-sensitive approach in which knowledge about religion and spirituality is included is a primary condition for communication with this target group.
27 September 2021
How much influence does the ambassador of the Netherlands in Mali have? How does he keep contact with a government that is constantly burdened by coups? On 21 September 2021 Amsterdam debating centre De Balie invited Marchel Gerrmann, Netherlands ambassador to Mali, and Mirjam de Bruijn, ASCL researcher and Mali expert, to reflect on current and future developments in the country. You can now watch the video.