Wilhelm Heitmeyer

Wilhelm Heitmeyer (born 28 June 1945, Nettelstedt, Germany) is sociologist and Professor of Education specializing in socialisation. From 1996 to 2013 he headed the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence (IKG) at Bielefeld University. Since retiring as director, he has held the position of Senior Research Professor at IKG.

Wilhelm Heitmeyer’s father was a typesetter, who was killed in World War II. His mother worked in a cigar factory and later ran a grocer’s shop.[1] Heitmeyer attended the Wittekind-Gymnasium in Lübbecke, North Rhine-Westphalia, before going on to study education and sociology at the University of Bielefeld. He received his doctorate in 1977, his habilitation in 1988.

Before embarking on an academic career Heitmeyer worked as a typesetter, and briefly as a secondary school teacher.

He resigned his longstanding membership of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1992, in protest at its asylum policy.[2]

Heitmeyer has been married since 1968, and has two daughters.

Heitmeyer’s research interests have focused since 1983 on empirical research into right-wing extremism, violence, xenophobia, ethnic/cultural conflicts, and social disintegration. Since 1990 he has conducted a long-term investigation of group-focused enmity. Heitmeyer has completed numerous projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In the mid-1980s he was one of the first to study extreme right-wing orientations among adolescents, and also violence in soccer stadiums. In the mid-1990s he was already investigating fundamentalist orientations among young Muslims. More recently, his interest has turned to violence in the Global South.

In 1996 Heitmeyer founded the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, where he served as director until retiring in 2013. As founding editor-in-chief, he published the International Journal of Conflict and Violence from 2008 to 2014, together with Douglas Massey (Princeton), Steven Messner (Albany), James Sidanius (Harvard), and Michel Wieviorka (EHSS Paris).

In his work Heitmeyer puts forward the theory of social disintegration, which he developed with colleagues in the 1990s to explain violence, right-wing extremism, and ethnic/cultural conflicts. The theory is also known in the social sciences as the “Bielefeld disintegration approach,” and forms the basis for the syndrome of group-focused enmity. Disintegration is understood as the failure of societal institutions and communities to secure material existence, social recognition, and personal intactness. The essence of the theory is that as the experience and fear of disintegration increase, the extent and intensity of conflict expand and the ability to regulate it shrinks.

...
Wikipedia