Mary Elizabeth King is professor of peace and conflict studies at the UN-affiliated University for Peace, and distinguished scholar with the American University’s Center for Global Peace, in Washington, DC. She is a Rothermere American Institute Fellow at Britain’s Oxford University. Her doctorate in international politics is from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth.

King’s most recent work is a reference book, The New York Times on Emerging Democracies in Eastern Europe. She is the author of A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance. In 2002, New Delhi’s Indian Council for Cultural Relations released the second edition of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr: The Power of Nonviolent Action, originally published by UNESCO. In 1988, she won a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award for Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. With support from the United States Institute of Peace, she is completing a book tentatively titled Conversion and the Mechanisms of Change in Nonviolent Action: The 1924–25 Vykom Satyagraha Case.

As a presidential appointee in the Carter administration, King had worldwide oversight for the Peace Corps and other U.S. volunteer service corps programs. In the U.S. civil rights movement, she worked alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. (no relation) in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She co-authored “Sex and Caste” with Casey Hayden, a 1966 article viewed by historians as tinder for second-wave feminism.

In 1989, her alma mater Ohio Wesleyan University honored her with its highest award. In 2003, she received the Jamnalal Bajaj International Prize for the promotion of Gandhian values, joining the ranks of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat, and Professor Johan Galtung. She was awarded the 2009 El-Hibri Peace Education Prize “in recognition of her life-long devotion to the field of peace education and her outstanding work toward peace in the Middle East.”