Martin Bútora is slovak sociologist, writer, university teacher and diplomat.

In the 1960s, he worked as an editor for the magazines Echo, Reflex and Kultúrny život, later as a documentarian at the Labor Research Institute. After the Soviet occupation, he was politically out of favor and in 1977 he refused to vote for the resolution condemning Charter 77. In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked as a sociologist and therapist in the Anti-Alcoholic Counseling Center and moved in a circle of independent sociologists and writers critical of the communist regime.

During the Velvet Revolution in November 1989, he was one of the co-founders of the Public Against Violence movement and co-author of its election program. He worked as an adviser to President Václav Havel for human rights and director of the section for human rights in the Office of the President.

He taught at Charles University in Prague, later worked at the Department of Political Science of the University of Trnava in Trnava. In the 1990s, he was the chairman of the Slovak Center of the PEN Club and also acted as the coordinator of the oral history project of Holocaust survivors at the Milan Šimečka Foundation. He lectured and published at home and abroad (USA).

In 1997, he became the co-founder and president of the Institute for Public Issues (IVO), where he worked as an analyst and currently is an honorary member. Between 1999 and 2003, he served as Slovakia's ambassador to the USA.

In addition to politics and sociology, he is also devoted to fiction (With easy pen (1987), I'm afraid to be afraid (1990), Salted in Asia (1990), Jump and Look (2011)), film scripts or translations of theater plays.