Wilhelm Heitmeyer

Wilhelm Heitmeyer (born 28 June 1945, in Nettelstedt, Germany) is sociologist and professor of education specializing in socialisation.

Heitmeyer attended the Wittekind-Gymnasium in Lübbecke, North Rhine-Westphalia, before going on to study education and sociology at the University of Bielefeld.

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.

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.

In the disintegration approach social and societal integration of individuals and groups is understood as a successful balance between freedoms and bonds, where three specific problems are adequately resolved: - In the sociostructural dimension, adequate participation in the material goods required for reproduction (labor, housing, consumer markets).

- In the institutional dimension, political powerlessness leads to withdrawal from public affairs, including participation in securing core norms such as justice, solidarity, and fairness.

Group-focused enmity describes abasement and discrimination occurring solely on the basis of actual or attributed group membership, regardless of individual behavior.

A ten-year project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and a DFG graduate college investigated this field with annual representative population surveys from 2002 to 2011.

In 2014 the Innovation Prize of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia gave Heitmeyer an honorary award for his development to conflict and violence research.