Wolfgang Petritsch was born in Klagenfurt, Austria. He holds a doctorate in South-East European History and Politics from the University of Vienna, which he received in 1972, and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Dr. Petritsch’s reflections on international affairs have been published extensively in the world’s leading newspapers and he is the author or co-author of several books.

From 1977 to 1983 he was Advisor and Press Secretary of the Austrian Federal Chancellor Bruno Kreisky. From 1984 to 1992, he was Head of the Austrian Press and Information Service in New York. He was then Acting Head of the Department for Multilateral Economic Co-operation in the Austrian MFA until 1994. In 1994 he became the Head of Department for Information on European Affairs in the Federal Chancellery, supervising the Federal Government's information campaign on Austria's accession to the EU. Then from 1995-1997 he led the Department for International Relations of the City of Vienna.

Dr. Petritsch has had extensive experience in the Balkans. Appointed as the Austrian ambassador to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, he also served from October 1998 to July 1999 as the European Union’s Special Envoy for Kosovo and in February and March 1999 as the European Union’s Chief Negotiator at the Kosovo peace talks in Rambouillet and Paris. Dr. Petritsch then served between August 1999 and May 2002 as the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this role, Dr. Petritsch was the final authority on civilian implementation of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement. He was appointed in 2002 as Austria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva. In 2006 he was awarded the European Human Rights Prize in recognition of his work as High Representative in BiH and as Chairman of the Nairobi Summit against Anti-Personnel Mines. Dr. Wolfgang Petritsch took up his duties as Permanent Representative of Austria to the OECD in March 2008.