Dr. Mario Aguilar
Professor of Religion and Politics at the University of St Andrews
Mario I Aguilar is Professor of Religion and Politics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Politics (CSRP) at the same university. He studied philosophy in his native Chile and later theology at KU Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) in Belgium. After serving as Director of Save the Children Fund (Canada) in Kenya/Somalia he was trained in social anthropology, history of African and African legal systems at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London where he completed his PhD on Oromo systems of thought and conversion to Islam within the relations between Kenya/Somalia in colonial times and the Somali Civil War. In 1994 he started work in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the extension of genocides with his works: Being Oromo in Kenya (1998), Theology, Liberation and Genocide (2009) and his work on 22 Truth Commissions including South Africa, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Argentina.
On rights and constitutionalism, he has worked on the constitutions of Kenya, Uganda, Somaliland, Morocco, Algeria, and India and has proposed the absolute primacy of law in the prevention of genocide, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. Thus, he had examined historically ethnic and political violence in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, see his work Interreligious Dialogue and the Partition of India (2018). In his later work he has been closely associated with Vatican efforts for peace and dialogue, human rights and migrations, genocide and violence in Iraq and the Yazidi genocide, see the XIV Dalai Lama: Peacekeeping and Universal responsibility (2021), Pope Francis: Journeys of a Peacemaker (2022), and Nadia Murad: Yazidi and World Peacemaker (2025).
He is the international coordinator of the project “Burying the Dead” on topologies of dead, inhumations and the movement of tombs in Colombia, Chile, Peru, Egypt, Somalia, and the Commonwealth Cemeteries. He is the editor of the Bulletin of Vatican Diplomacy. His next book will be a biography of Pope Leo XIV. He has been a diplomat for Chile and advisor to the British Foreign Secretary on the consultation on sexual violence in war.
