Wilhelm Heitmeyer is a noted German sociologist, educationalist, and professor of socialization at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence (IKG) at Bielefeld University, Germany. He founded the institute in 1996 and was founding director till 2013. Since then he has held a research professorship there. Professor Heitmeyer's long-term research interest is on right-wing extremism, violence, xenophobia, ethnic-cultural conflicts, social disintegration, and group-focused enmity. To this end, he has implemented numerous projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He has also been interested in violence in the Global South for several years. He advocates the theory of social disintegration, which he developed with collaborators in the 1990s to explain violence, right-wing extremism, and ethnic-cultural conflicts. This theory is also known as the "Bielefeld disintegration approach" in the social sciences. In 2003 he was, together with John Hagan,the editor of the International Handbook of Violence Research. In 2008, he founded the International Journal of Conflict and Violence, which he edited until 2014 together with Douglas Massey (Princeton), Steven Messner (Albany), James Sidanius (Harvard) and Michel Wieviorka (EHSS Paris) and edited a series of books in German which examined the state of discrimination against Jews, Muslims, non-whites, homosexuals, the homeless and other groups in 10 volumes from 2002 to 2011 (with Suhrkamp Verlag).
