Acknowledgements

Every publication is the end product of multiple dialogues, traced across diverging conversations that provide opportunities to learn and share, to reflect and rethink one’s own ideas. On Othering: Processes and Politics of Unpeace is the outcome of many rich conversations over the years with a variety of visiting scholars, colleagues and students at Arizona State University, and those we had the honour of encountering in our many travels. They have contributed in many different ways to the development of our study on the place of minorities and belonging within nation-states, challenges to peace, and the ethics of living with differences. We are deeply grateful for these conversations.

We are indebted to the contributors to this volume for their input in thinking with us about the challenges to peace globally as the processes of constructing the Other go on relentlessly. Several of the authors in this volume met together at an international conference hosted by the Hardt-Nickachos Peace Studies Initiative in November 2019. The ideas and interest generated during this workshop provided the impetus to envision this book. Discussions continued over the next two years as new contributors also joined in the effort to put together this volume. We are grateful to all of them for creating the collective and for forging common ground to think of peace or unpeace from the vantage point of the Other.

Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict offers a unique space within a public university to advance the study of peace. The generous financial support of the Hardt-Nickachos Initiative has afforded us the luxury to host annual workshops, panel discussions, and conferences enabling the realization of this book and two other books published as a trilogy on “people’s peace.” In particular, we would like to thank John Carlson, Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict (CSRC), and Carolyn Forbes, who was the Assistant Director then, for their support. We would not have been able to achieve as much as we have without the efforts of Matt Correa, Research Administrator at CSRC, who provided us logistical and practical support, as well as scholarly input as we were formulating our ideas to write this book. We are particularly grateful to Isabelle Kinney for her research assistance and aid in getting the manuscript ready for publication.

This book as well as two other publications are the outcome of a generous endowment made by Anne Hardt to CSRC. As a retired professor of education, Anne’s life work has been to advance mutual understanding and respect, justice, and peace. To her, we are forever grateful, not just for the endowment, but for her commitment, her spirit, and her energy. To Arizona State University’s president, Michael Crow, we are deeply grateful for his vision that incubated peace studies and for his steadfast support to continue our efforts to develop peace studies from a humanities perspective, which is both unique and unusual.

We are honoured and fortunate to be working with Athabasca University Press, which carries forward values of scholarly engagement and access that advance peace and understanding. We are thankful for the support of George Melnyk, the series editor for the press’s Global Peace Studies series. Communication with our editor, Pamela Holway, has been enlightening and encouraging, and we appreciate her shepherding this project to fruition. We are of course deeply grateful to all the staff at AU Press for their assistance and input into this volume.