Introduction: Encounters with difference

This special issue examines encounters across religious difference asking how these are shaped by and exceed the limits of liberal frameworks. Building on the editors' research into religious encounters in non-liberal contexts, this volume argues that such ethnographic settings provide a distinctive vantage point for rethinking the governance and theorization of difference. Liberal discourses of diversity and tolerance often narrow our focus to prescribed arenas and sanctioned forms of engagement, sidelining other processes, ideas, and modes of existence. The articles gathered here identify recurring dynamics through which such erasures unfold, demonstrating how attention to non-liberal encounters can expand our conceptual and political horizons by emphasizing particularistic, ephemeral, processual and embodied modes of engagement. At a moment when liberalism faces challenges both from the far right and from its own complicities in violence and exclusion, this collection calls for an openness to forms of engagement with difference that push beyond and unsettle liberal frameworks.