Martin Butora

Martin Butora was one of the founders of the Public Against Violence movement in Slovakia in November 1989, and served as Human Rights Advisor to President Václav Havel (1990-1992). A sociologist by training, he taught at Charles University in Prague and at Trnava University before founding the Institute for Public Affairs (IVO) in 1997, an independent public policy think tank in Bratislava, and becoming its first president. In 1995-1997, he launched and coordinated a research and educational project based on video testimonies of Holocaust survivors from Slovakia conducted by Milan Simečka Foundation in cooperation with the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University. Between 1999 and 2003, he served as Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the United States. He writes on civil society, foreign policy, and democratic transformation and is also is an author of three prosaic works. In 2004, he puslished a collection of his studies and articles Odklínanie (Breaking the Curse), 2004. In 2007, he contributed to Reclaiming Democracy: Civil Society and Electoral Change in Central and Eastern Europe with his chapter OK '98: A Campaign of Slovak NGOs for Free and Fair Elections. Also in 2007, he co-authored and co-edited Democracy and Populism in Central Europe, and in October 2007 issue of Journal of Democracy, he published an essay Nightmares from the Past, Dreams of the Future. He also regularly co-authors and co-edits IVO’s annual series of comprehensive country reports, including the last one, Slovakia 2008. A Global Report on the State of Society), 2009.