Acknowledgments

As editors of The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory, we are grateful for the support of our respective universities and departments: the London School of Economics, the University of Virginia and the Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Our greatest debt is to our families, who have supported us throughout the long editorial process. We owe special gratitude to the three children born to editors over the five years of work on this project: Leigh’s sons Casimir and Claude and Murad’s daughter Salwa. Leigh would also like to thank her partner Ernest; Murad, his partner Theresa; and Megan, her partner Mark.

Angela Chnapko, our editor at Oxford University Press, deserves special mention for her indefatigable patience, enthusiasm, and support for this handbook. Her encouragement, attentiveness to detail, and willingness to experiment with editorial innovations made compilation of this complex, multiauthor volume as easy as it could be. We would also like to thank assistant editors Princess Ikatekit and Alexcee Bechthold for their additional support.

We are especially grateful to all those who offered feedback on “Comparison, Connectivity, and Disconnection,” our introduction to the handbook. For their comments on an early version, we are grateful to Humeira Iqtidar, Rochana Bajpai, and Michael Freeden, participants at the roundtable “The Future of Comparative Political Theory” held at the London School of Economics in December 2016; and to participants at the University of California–Los Angeles Political Theory Workshop in January 2017. Lawrie Balfour, Roxanne L. Euben, Anne Phillips, and Andrew Sartori all gave extremely helpful written comments on the final draft. Roxanne L. Euben and Melissa Williams provided essential support in the initial planning stages of the project and shared their insights as to what a handbook of this nature might accomplish. And, of course, each of the thirty-one entry writers deserves thanks for his or her patience, hard work, and dedication.

Finally, each of the editors wishes to acknowledge the sheer pleasure and fun it has been to work with the other two editors, even when separated by continents and time zones. We are not sure any of us imagined just how much we would each learn in the process. We hope that readers of the handbook will similarly find the following chapters exciting points of entry and that their points of connection and disconnection shall be doorways that facilitate future scholarship.