Department of Political Science, Radboud University Nijmegen

Promovendus: Rechtvaardig Onderwijs | Radboud Universiteit Als Promovendus: Rechtvaardig Onderwijs werken bij Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen? Bekijk hier de vacature!

🚨 PhD Vacancy Alert: 'Just Education' 🚨

www.ru.nl/werken-bij/v...

Es war den Studierenden eine Ehre und Freude! Glückwünsche zurück an alle Teilnehmenden und das Organisationsteam 🙏

🎉🎉🎉

🔥 English Final Time! 🔥

@radboudpol.bsky.social vs. @unicologne.bsky.social - two outstanding teams, one last debate and an English final, packed with sharp arguments, passion and true European spirit 🇪🇺

Who will convince the jury?

Let the final begin! 💬✨

#NRWdebattiertEuropa

🥈 #2 Most Read

🗣️ Parlasent: mapping sentiment in political discourse with large language models

✒️ Michal Mochtak (@radboudpol.bsky.social), Peter Rupnik, Taja Kuzman & Nikola Ljubešić (all Jožef Stefan Institute)

🔗 buff.ly/AYFnfNm

Our project #NRWdebattiertEuropa has grown from a regional format into a cross-border European project with English-language debates.

Last year already joined by @radboudpol.bsky.social -
this year we are looking forward to welcoming @maastrichtu.bsky.social! www.uni-due.de/politik/nrwd... #UDE

Quick note that while we happen to indeed claim Anna as our own, we're Radboud University's Department of Political Science only. We hope that the central university team will join us here on Bsky soon! 😅

Elif's joy in studying, as evinced by the short film she made together with her friends, and her dedication to improving the world serve as an inspiration for us all.

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Lounge named after deceased former student - Vox magazine The student lounge in the new building of the Nijmegen School of Management bears the name of former student Elif Yavuz, who was killed in a terrorist attack in Kenya five years ago. 'We hope she’ll c...

In Elif's memory, the student lounge in 'our' Elinor Ostrom Building was named after her in 2018.

www.voxweb.nl/en/lounge-na...

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On 21 September 2013, Elif, her partner and 67 others were killed by a terrorist group in a shopping mall in Nairobi. Elif, who was 33 at the time, was heavily pregnant and had just started her career, dedicated to fighting malaria.

news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

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After studying in Nijmegen, Elif went to Bologna and then Washington DC for her MA at SAIS/Johns Hopkins University. She conducted research on malaria in Uganda for the Clinton Foundation, where she met her partner. In March 2013, Elif's obtained a PhD at Harvard University.

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For many, watching this film about Elif's student life will be a special and emotional experience. In 2013, Elif and her partner were killed in a terrorist attack in Nairobi, which also claimed the lives of more than 60 other victims. 🖤

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We also see how students enjoy their breaks and go for drinks after lectures. The film shows the canteen and the CultuurCafé (still around!), where smoking was still allowed indoors at the time.

The film ends with a cozy dinner with housemates.

4/9

We see Elif get up and attend a seminar by Kees van Kersbergen, Markus Haverland & Maarten Cras (who is still with us!). Students also consult study advisor Rob Verhofstad with questions about their careers.

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The film was made by then-students of the Political Science program, which is evident from the film's style and humorous tone.

It is a great testament to change and continuity at Radboud - but also to the life of Elif Yavuz, a former Political Science student, whose day we follow.

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YouTube video by Radboud University Radboud Archives | "Een dag uit het leven van een student politicologie" (2000)

🕯️Happy Advent 🕯️

To celebrate the start of December, here's a rare thread from us on something very special: this amazing short film, entitled 'The life of a Political Science student', made in 2000 and featuring our department.

The film is available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPEw...

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‘Uit onderzoeken blijkt dat de inhoudelijke meningsverschillen onder burgers vele malen kleiner zijn dan die tussen politici of stemmen in de media.’ Carolien van Ham

@casperthomas.bsky.social @groene.nl @radboudpol.bsky.social #democratie
www.groene.nl/artikel/onze...

On 29 January 2026, students will once again take the floor at
@unidue.bsky.social to debate:

• Online hate speech
• Trump's tariff policy
• Open borders in Europe

With amazing teams from @unicologne.bsky.social, @maastrichtu.bsky.social and @radboudpol.bsky.social! 💪

#UDE #NRWdebattiertEuropa

🚨 Publication Alert 🚨

Racism, colonialism, and tax havens: tracing the offshore world’s hidden histories This article advances a decolonial intervention in International Political Economy (IPE) by examining the centrality of racism in the formation of offshore zones under British and American colonial...

🚨 Publication Alert 🚨

Miguel A. Rivera-Quiñones with a new article in @ripejournal.bsky.social titled "Racism, colonialism, and tax havens: tracing the offshore world’s hidden histories" - check it out here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

In her MA course on applying theoretical approaches to conflict, @haleyswedlund.bsky.social brought out the legos - for students to redesign global justice and build the future of conflict studies amidst a rapidly changing world.

A playful way to end a 'heavy' course!

Political scientists in (inter)national media on elections | Radboud University During elections, our experts are particularly busy explaining electoral systems, voting behaviour and the specifics of Dutch politics in national and international media.

Our experts were busy explaining the Dutch election - outcomes, voting behavior, coalition dynamics, etc. - to a wide range of international and national audiences, across different outlets.

Check out a selection here: www.ru.nl/en/about-us/...

Benchmarking labour competitiveness: the politics of institutionalizing unit labour cost surveillance in the European Union In responding to the 2008 financial crisis, EU crisis management evolved through successive diagnostic reframings that shifted the root causes from credit crunch to sovereign debt crisis to competi...

🚨Publication Alert 🚨
Our own @angelawigger.bsky.social and co-author with a new piece in Policy Studies, exploring how unit labour cost scoreboards remain firmly embedded in EU post-crisis governance. This reveals the persistence of competitiveness logics.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Types of decorations, their social meaning and influence on moral injury: A mixed methods approach Research on moral injury has thus far paid little attention to social factors and cultural elements. This study addresses this gap by examining the effects of one particular cultural artefact on moral...

🚨 Publication Alert 🚨
Our own Tine Molendijk and co-author with a new article in @plosone.org on the linkage between military decorations and moral injury. Check it out here: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Ooof. Our Dutch election experts were *busy*. You could have spotted them all over international (CNN, NYT) and Dutch media (NOS, NRC, NPO), blogging and podcasting away. Links soon to follow!

a map of netherlands with flags and a cartoon character ALT: a map of netherlands with flags and a cartoon character

HEADS-UP! 🚨

On Wednesday October 29, the Netherlands will holds its 9th (!) legislative elections of the 21st century. I will continue to post disproportionately about my country of birth and citizenship (but not of residence) in the coming weeks.

This will be my thread for Dutch news! 🧵

Please, join us tomorrow for Georg Löfflmann's book talk and discussion with Cora Lacatus (CGD Director) and Angelos Chryssogelos (London Metropolitan University) on the Trump presidency and the study of populism in IR.

This article explores alliance behaviour among female insurgents. I argue that interethnic cooperation among women affiliated with different ethnic armed groups is affected by whether women share a commitment to gender egalitarianism and the level of repression they face from their male co-ethnics. Building on previous research, I create a typology of women’s alliance behaviour that explains variation in the level of cooperation and the type of alliance women form. I disaggregate gender egalitarianism along three dimensions – shared victimhood, promotion of gender equality and linkages to civil society – to show how women overcome mistrust to create social bonds. Using the case of the Karen Women’s Organisation (KWO), I demonstrate that even in the face of repression, once these bonds are created, they are unlikely to break down. This study adds to research highlighting the role of repression in driving wartime alliances.

The fourth article in Global Society 39(4) is "Repression and Alliance Formation: A Gender(ed) Approach to Interethnic Cooperation During Conflict" by Shelli Israelsen (@radboudpol.bsky.social). Be sure to give it a read!

#Repression #Gender #OpenAccess

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Geert Wilders convinced Dutch voters the far right could run the country. What is their verdict now? A failed two-year experiment has lessons for the rest of Europe about the appeal – and the limits – of populism • Don’t get This Is Europe delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Good primer from @theguardian.com on the Dutch elections, with comments from Koen Vossen (@radboudpol.bsky.social), @casmudde.bsky.social and - rather humbled by the company - me.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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