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Two trends mark the contemporary international scholarship on conflict and resolution. The scholarship on conflict has begun to look systematically at intra-state conflicts and track the role of non-state actors, along with the more established trend of analysing inter-state conflict. Conflict resolution has also moved beyond looking at states and national and global-level NGOs to the role of local, non-state actors in preventing and/or minimising conflict. While the “mainstream” scholarly work emphasises a linear process of reaching resolutions in the aftermath of a conflict (e.g. Burton, 1990; Galtung, 1965), a range of “related” scholarship has begun to focus on factors that prevent conflict and their rapid diffusion over wider areas, as well as factors that contribute to longer term, peaceful, resolution (e.g. Das, Kleinman, Lock, Ramphele, & Reynolds, 2001; Sabet, 1998; Varshney, 2001). These related literature look beyond political solutions such as conflict management, boundary adjustments, and treaties, and the role of international and national formal bodies to resolve and manage conflict; their emphasis is on conflict prevention, the healing of conflict victims, and building and sustaining peace. With the recognition, in the 21st century, of the escalating production and spread of weaponry, the power of non-state actors to generate significant conflict, as well as the rapidly growing proportion of people who suffer from and cope with the aftermath of such conflict, the expanded frames for understanding conflict and resolution, requires further attention.

My encounter with ‘interculturality’ was partly occasioned by the fact of being born in Belgium at a period in time where growing up with multilinguality was a matter of normality and partly by then living and working in eight countries across all continents. Working in local communities and later in academic contexts sharpened my awareness about the importance of language in the transference of knowledge and interlinguistic exchanges of knowledges. Especially knowledges pertaining to the underlying ontological and epistemological differences and shadings of meanings and that require contextual understanding of these meanings are at the core of the chapter. The regular mistranslations occurring from social science texts originally written in other-than-English languages caused original meanings to get lost in translation. Some of the consequences of such mistranslations are examined, focussing on education and possible futures in our ‘pluriverse’, especially in the present epoch where global conversations are ever more important to address our predicaments, facing ecological disaster, extinction and the potential un-liveability for humans and so many other species of the earth. Including the non-human in our relational considerations for a possible future enlarges the need for new and interculturally understandable knowledge systems and the positivist and other epistemological inclinations in the dominant West will not make this any easier considering our rather sad record during the past four centuries.