Robert J. Brym is Professor and Associate Chair (Undergraduate) of the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has published widely on politics and social movements in Canada, Russia, and the Middle East. His most recent books are New Society, 7th edition (2014) and Society in Question, 7th edition (2014), both published by Nelson. He has served as editor of several scholarly journals and won numerous awards for his teaching and scholarly work. Brym recently completed a project on state and collective violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the results of which were published in Social Forces, the British Journal of Sociology, and elsewhere. He is currently conducting research on the democracy movement in the Middle East and North Africa.

John Lie was born in South Korea, grew up in Japan and Hawaii, and attended Harvard University. Currently Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, he has taught at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Harvard University, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the United States, as well as at universities in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and New Zealand. His main research interests are comparative macrosociology and comparative race and ethnic relations. He has taught introductory sociology classes ranging in size from three to over seven hundred students in several countries, and hopes that this book will stimulate readers' sociological imagination.