About the Author

Neville Edward Alexander (22 October 1936 - 27 August 2012) was a major proponent of linguistic diversity and multilingualism. After his release in 1974 from political imprisonment on Robben Island, South Africa, he carried out pioneering work in the field of language policy and planning in South Africa, contributing to the National Language Project, and becoming founder and director of the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA). In 1981, he was appointed Director of the South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED) in Cape Town, South Africa. He also made an influential contribution to the Language Plan Task Group (LANGTAG) process instituted in 1996. His prolific research output on language and education issues in South Africa is reflected in various academic journals and books. He has also written on socialism, and in 2003 published An ordinary country: Issues in the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa. In 2003, he was co-chair of the steering committee set up under the auspices of the African Union to found the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN) as the official language policy and planning agency of the African Union; he afterwards served as a member on the board of ACALAN. In 2004, he cochaired another steering committee for the Implementation of the Language Plan of Action for Africa (ILPAA) in Yaounde, Cameroon, with the goal of establishing a frame of reference for the assessment of government interventions in language infrastructure. In South Africa, he was awarded the Order of the Disa in 2004 in recognition of his long-term commitment to socio-political issues and education. In Barcelona in 2008, he won the Linguapax Prize for his contribution to linguistic diversity and multilingual education over more than twenty years. Arnulf von Scheliha was born in 1961. Since 2003, he has been a full professor for Systematic Theology (Philosophy of Religion, Dogmatics, Ethics) at the Institute for Protestant Theology, University of Osnabruck, Germany. He is the scientific coordinator for the programme Visiting Chair for Peace and Global Justice and is a member of the board of the interdisciplinary Zentrum fur Demokratie- und Friedenforschung (ZeDF) (Centre for Democracy and Peace Research) at the University of Osnabruck, Germany. His main research topics are political ethics (especially normative fundaments, European religious culture and ethics of peace), moral problems of modern lifestyle, interreligious hermeneutics (especially the relations between Christianity, Judaism and Islam), History of Theology in the 19th and 20th century in consideration of social history and the history of ideas and the transformation of religion in pluralistic societies.