Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICwS)

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies, founded in 1949, is the only postgraduate academic institution in the United Kingdom devoted to the study of the Commonwealth. The Institute is a national and international centre of excellence for policy-relevant research, research facilitation and teaching. As a member of the School of Advanced Study(Opens in new window), established in 1994, the Institute works with eight other prestigious postgraduate research institutes to offer academic opportunities across and between a wide range of subject fields in the humanities and social sciences.

We are home to a number of postgraduate study programmes, including the longest-running interdisciplinary and practice-oriented human rights MA program in the UK(Opens in new window) and a distance-learning human rights degree(Opens in new window). The Institute also offers research degrees and provides research training. 

The Institute is the administrative home of the Human Rights Consortium(Opens in new window).

The Institute’s Library is an international resource holding more than 190,000 volumes, with particularly impressive Caribbean, Southern African and Australian holdings and over 200 archival collections.