How can we deal with today’s global challenges in sustainable, peaceful, fair, democratic, and effective ways? How can global events such as geopolitical shifts, ecological changes, technological innovations, and pandemics be better governed? Addressing these complex questions requires innovative, multidisciplinary approaches and an open conversation between various stakeholders. To promote such conversations, the Global Transformations and Governance Challenges (GTGC) program at Leiden University organized its first international conference on 8-10 June 2022 at Campus The Hague.

Jan Aart Scholte was lead organizer of a conference on ‘Future Directions in Global Legitimacy Research’, held in Stockholm on 21-22 June 2022. The gathering assembled 50 leading scholars on this subject to reflect on future research concerning the sources, processes, and consequences of legitimacy in global governance.

Global Transformations and Governance Challenges (GTGC) at Leiden University aims to advance knowledge and practice on how we govern – and could govern – major world-scale changes in contemporary society. These global transformations include hegemonic and other geopolitical shifts, ecological changes, technological innovations, pandemics, demographic trends, economic restructuring, reconfigured identities, and altered forms of violence and peacebuilding.

On 10 December 2021, the GTGC Conflict, Peace and Security thematic group organized a research seminar. In this seminar, Tahir Abbas, from the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs, presented a draft on ERC grant application on the inter-generational dynamics of Islamism in Western Europe.

Terrorism destabilizes governments, undermines civil society, threatens social and economic development, endangers democracy, and directly impacts human rights. The extraordinary events on 9/11 turned counterterrorism into a global governance project. The global collaboration is unprecedented with traditional rivals working together as key stakeholders against shared threats. The collaboration has not created invariable, coherent, or fully harmonized counterterrorism and there remains significant variation in practices across countries and over time.

Located at Leiden University's Campus The Hague, GTGC lies at the heart of one of the world's main hubs of global governance. The programme maintains active contact with many key policy stakeholders. Below is more information about our links to Global The Hague.

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 companies. Yet such national regulatory initiatives have not dulled the market ambitions of global platform companies even as demand patterns change in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. These platforms lead to new social challenges, new uses of urban space, new forms of labour precarity, and new governance constraints.

Meet the core staff behind Global Transformations and Governance Challenges, which consists of a Professor, a Postdoctoral Researcher, a PhD Candidate, and multiple Programme Officers and Assistants.

On 29 April 2023, Jan Aart Scholte and co-researcher Hortense Jongen presented their research on legitimacy in multistakeholder global governance to the Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Brussels.