Societal research

The purpose of NIOD was always to be ‘an institute of use to society’. This refers to its ambition to actively contribute relevant and reliable information to the debate in the academic community and society as a whole. NIOD employees are highly motivated to carry out critical research and, based on this research, to participate in discussions that cover a wide range of topics. These include the legacies of collaboration and resistance, the roots of genocide, issues involving the deprivation and restoration of rights, and putting racism and antisemitism on the agenda.

Social Research faces the challenge of making research accessible to a wide audience while adhering to academic standards and striving for academic excellence. These criteria are NIOD’s source of inspiration in its innovative research. The guiding principle is that NIOD’s contributions in the field must always be linked to independent scholarly knowledge production. Externally funded projects will therefore always be embedded in the academic environment, for example by incorporating them into PhD programmes. This way, socially relevant issues can be combined with the training of young scholars.

Requests for research will be assessed on the basis of a number of criteria: the requests must be in line with NIOD’s expertise on war, violence, and genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries. Furthermore, the research must contribute to the increase of relevant knowledge.