Rudolf Stichweh, born in 1951, is a professor of sociology at Forum Internationale Wissenschaft and the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. His primary fields of research are the theory of world society and functional differentiation, the comparative study of democracies and autocracies, the history and sociology of science and universities, the study of inequality and asymmetrical dependencies in human societies, the sociology of the stranger.