International Studies

Fascinated by foreign countries around the globe, but want to know more? Addicted to international news and events but feel a need for deeper understanding?

The new International Studies degree offers you a unique combination of area studies, placed in an international setting and provides the opportunity to learn a foreign language. After a broad semester, you specialise in one of nine world areas and one of its languages. You analyse your area of choice from cultural, economic, historical and political angles and compare them within an international perspective.

Comparative area studies

The BA International Studies is designed around three elements: core courses that introduce disciplinary concepts and that analyse the international setting, area courses that analyse the situation in a selected region from a disciplinary, and increasingly interdisciplinary, perspective and language courses that prepare students for access to the cultural context in the relevant language. The core concepts, ideas and methods are taken from four broad disciplinary approaches:

History (mostly modern history)

Cultural Studies (modern cultural phenomena in their societal settings)

Economics (and the concepts from International Political Economy)

Political Science (and Sociology and Anthropology)

The areas offered in the degree, and their corresponding languages are:

Area	Foreign Language
East Asia	Chinese, Japanese (Korean)
Latin America	Spanish (Portuguese)
Middle-East	Arabic (Persian, Turkish)
North America	French, Spanish
Russia and Eurasia	Russian
South Asia	Hindi
Southern Africa	Afrikaans (Swahili)
South-East Asia	Indonesian, Spanish
Western Europe	Dutch, French, German, Spanish (Italian, Portuguese)

The programme guarantees the key languages for each area (indicated in normal type) but will offer more (indicated in italics)if there is sufficient demand. Moreover, if possible, students may attend language classes with other students at the Leiden campus. The first semester is common for all students after which they choose an area for further specialization, and a corresponding language for study.

Once the second semester starts, the core disciplines, the areas and the foreign language training all being to interact. These four disciplinary approaches are interdependent and mutually reinforcing, allowing students to develop increasingly sophisticated frameworks analysis. These ideas are explored and tested inside the chosen areas, often also with a comparative approach within the area. By the end of the third semester students choose from a range of core- and area-electives designed to exploit and extend their increasingly sophisticated analytical capacities and ambitions. On the basis of these fourth semester courses and in consultation with their supervisor, students choose a thesis topic.