Shlomo Avineri is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute for European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Born in Poland in 1933, he has lived in Israel since 1939. He studied at the Hebrew University and the London School of Economics and has held visiting appointments at Yale, Cornell, the University of California, Wesleyan University, Oxford, the Australian National University, the Central European University in Budapest, Cardozo School of Law in New York and Northwestern University.

He was also visiting scholar at the Wilson Center, the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (all in Washington D.C.), Collegium Budapest, as well as the Institute of World Economics and International Relations (IMEMO) in Moscow.

During 1975-77 he was Director-General of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the first government of Yitzhak Rabin. He also headed the Israeli delegation to the UNESCO General Assembly, and in 1979 was member of the joint Egyptian-Israeli commission that drafted the Cultural and Scientific Agreement between the two countries. In 1996 he was awarded the Israel Prize, the country's highest civilian decoration.

During 1990-92 he was a member of an international team of observers under the auspices of the National Democratic Institute for the first post-communist elections in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Estonia and Croatia as well as other NDI missions to Lithuania, Slovakia, Azerbaijan, Albania and Georgia.

His books, which have been translated into many languages, include: The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, Israel and the Palestinians, The Making of Modern Zionism, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism, Communitarianism and Individualism (with Avner de-Shalit), The Law of Religious Identity: Models for Post-Communism (with Andras Sajo), Integration and Identity, and Politics and Identities in Transformation (both with Werner Weidenfeld). He recently participated in preparing a Hebrew edition of Theodor Herzl's Diaries and wrote an historical introduction to the edition.

He is member of the editorial boards of Political Theory, The Review of Politics, History of European Ideas, Constellations, Dialektik, MEGA-Studien, The Owl of Minerva, Eastern European Politics and Societies, Eastern European Constitutional Review, and Problems of Philosophy (Moscow). He is member of the International Editorial Board of the edition of Marx-Engels Collected Works (MEGA), published in Amsterdam, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Civic Education Project (Washington, D.C. and Budapest).