Dallen J. Timothy is Professor of Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University and Senior Sustainability Scientist at the Julie Anne Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. He is also Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa; Visiting Professor at Hunan Normal University, Guangxi University, and Luoyang Normal University, China; and Guest Professor in the Erasmus Mundus European Master in Tourism Management programme based at the University of Girona, Spain. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Heritage Tourism and currently serves on the editorial boards of 24 international journals. He is commissioning or co-commissioning editor for four book series with Routledge and other publishers. He has ongoing research projects in North America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa on topics related to borders and tourism, religious tourism, heritage, and community empowerment.

Alon Gelbman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Tourism and Hotel Management at Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee, Israel. He is a cultural geographer and his research interests include international tourism and geopolitical borders, tourism and peace, urban/rural tourism, and host-guest relationships. His research papers have been published in leading academic journals, and he has conducted empirical field studies, developed theories, presented frequently at international conferences, taught, and received invitations regularly to speak at conferences and seminars abroad. A major thrust of his research in the tourism area is developing a theoretical foundation for tourism-geopolitical border relations between countries around the world and developing global models and theories about it, with significant connections to the topic of tourism and peace.