Mary Elizabeth King is a professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University for Peace. Dr. King was awarded the Jamnalal Bajaj International Award for promotion of Gandhian values outside India in November (2003). Previous winners of the international Bajaj Prize include Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat of the United Kingdom, and Professor Johan Galtung of (Norway).
She is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University. Her Ph.D. in international politics is from the Aberystwyth University, Wales.
Dr. King is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University for Peace, which is affiliated with the United Nations. She is a political scientist with expertise on nonviolent strategic action in acute political conflicts. King was in 2004-2005 Senior Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, the University of Oxford, Britain, where she researched case studies of nonviolent struggle from British colonial records. She is also Distinguished Scholar at the American University Center for Global Peace, in Washington D.C..
As a young student, she worked alongside the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (no relation) in the U.S. civil rights movement and was a member of the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Her book on that four-year experience, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (1987), won a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award.
Her book Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr: The Power of Nonviolent Action (1988), concerns nine contemporary nonviolent struggles of the 20th century. It was published and widely disseminated by UNESCO in Paris. Its second edition was brought out in New Delhi in (2002) by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and Mehta Publishers.
During the administration of Jimmy Carter, King was a presidential appointee confirmed by the US Senate. She had global responsibility for the Peace Corps and several national domestic volunteer service corps programs. She has worked with President Carter for thirty-five years and remains a special adviser.
She is the co-author, with Casey Hayden (Sandra Cason), of a document entitled “Sex and Caste.” It originated from within the American civil rights movement. The document was published in 1966 by Liberation, the magazine of the War Resisters League. Sex and Caste has since been credited as one of the generative documents that launched second-wave feminism. Historian Ruth Rosen in The World Split Open: How the Women's Movement Changed America (2001) calls her a central figure in starting the contemporary women's movement of the United States.
With the assistance of a grant from the United States Institute of Peace, she recently completed original archival research for a case study of a famous nonviolent struggle against untouchability in Vykom, Kerala, India, 1924–1925, which influenced the building of theory on the mechanisms of change in nonviolent civil resistance.
In May 2011, her alma mater Ohio Wesleyan University awarded her a doctor of laws (honorary) degree. In June, she received a James Lawson Award for Nonviolent Achievement. In July, Aberystwyth University made her a fellow.
Mary resides with her husband, Dr. Peter G. Bourne, in Virginia in the United States and Oxford in the United Kingdom.