Martin Bútora is a sociologist, writer and former diplomat, honorary president of the Institute for Public Affairs in Bratislava.
In the late 1960s, he was an editor of student and cultural magazines. After the Soviet occupation in 1968, he fell into political disfavor of the communist regime. He worked as a therapist in an alcohol rehabilitation clinic. At the same time, he was involved in independent activities of sociologists and writers criticizing the repressive regime. In November 1989, he co-founded the Public Against Violence movement, the leading force of the Velvet Revolution in Slovakia. In 1990–1992, he worked as a human rights advisor to President Václav Havel. In 1994–1996, he was the chairman of the Slovak PEN Centre.
In 1995–1997, he launched an oral history research project based on video testimonies of Jewish and Roma Holocaust survivors, organized by the Milan Šimečka Foundation in cooperation with Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at the Sterling Library of Yale University. In 1997 he co-founded Institute for Public Affairs (IVO), a public policy think tank, and became its first president. From February 1999 to June 2003, he served as the Slovak Ambassador to the United States. In 2014-2019, he was a foreign policy advisor to President Andrej Kiska.
He taught at Charles University in Prague, at Trnava University in Slovakia, and University of Economics in Bratislava. An alumnus of Comenius University in Bratislava, he is the author of numerous books, studies and articles on foreign policy, civil society and democracy building, the most recent one “Faces and Dates in the Rearview Mirror” published in 2023.
In 1999, the National Endowment for Democracy awarded him the Democracy Service Medal. In 2002, he received the Celebration of Freedom Award from the American Jewish Committee’s Washington Chapter. In 2002, the President of the Slovak Republic awarded him for his defense of human rights and the development of civil society. In 2011, the President of the Republic of Poland awarded him the Knight’s Cross of the Council of Merit, and in 2019, he became the laureate of the Dagmar and Václav Havel Foundation Award VIZE 97.