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Date: November 1, 1999
Slovak Ambassador to Speak on the "Rebirth of Civil Society"
Princeton, NJ -- Martin Butora, ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the United States, will speak on "Slovakia Ten Years After: Rebirth of Civil Society" at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs on Thursday, November 11, at 4:30 p.m. in Robertson Hall, Bowl 1.
Butora, who served as the human rights adviser to President Vaclav Havel and director of the section for human rights in the Office of the President of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic from 1990-92, was the co-founder of the Public Against Violence movement, a leading Slovak force in the opposition to communism. He spent 1993-94 at the Woodrow Wilson School as an Executive Education Fellow, and later coordinated a research project based on video testimonies of Holocaust survivors from Slovakia, produced in cooperation with the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University. From 1996-98 he was the coeditor of Global Reports on Slovakia, comprehensive analyses of Slovakia's development. In 1997, he co-established and became president of a public policy research think tank, the Institute for Public Affairs, in Bratislava.
Butora is the author of several books, including two sociological monographs and three books of fiction, and of articles in books, professional journals, magazines, and newspapers, including essays in the Journal of Democracy, Social Research, and Südosteuropa. He writes on post-Communist transformation, including civil society and nongovernmental organizations, political behavior, foreign policy issues, and ethnic and nationalism issues.
His lecture is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School.