Wolfgang Palaver is Professor emeritus of Catholic Social Thought at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He has published books and articles on violence and religion, Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, René Girard, Simone Weil and Mahatma Gandhi. His English books are Transforming the Sacred into Saintliness (2020); René Girard’s Mimetic Theory (2013). His most recent German publication is Für den Frieden kämpfen: In Zeiten des Krieges von Gandhi und Mandela lernen (2024). He is the co-editor of Passions in Economy, Politics, and the Media (2005), The European Wars of Religion (2016), The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion (2017), and Mimetic Theory and World Religions (2018). In fall 2018, he was a member of the research workshop on religion & violence at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton. From January until June 2021, he conducted a research project on Gandhi’s concept of nonviolence at The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.
