Editorial

Synthesizing specificity: multiple approaches to understanding the attack and defense of plants

Our proposal for a textbook and casebook designed for the study of British and American lexicography is based on our teaching of a course about the topic and our work as editors of the Middle English Dictionary. The first part of the textbook is an attempt to integrate the study of the methods and history of lexicography. In the case of defining, for example, we would first explain how a lexicographer derives a definition from citations and then present the evolution of defining from medieval glosses to definitions of the type found in current historical or unabridged commercial dictionaries. The second part of the textbook will treat the cultural, biographical, and organizational aspects of the various periods in the development of lexicography.

In today’s global marketplace, the need is greater than ever before for nations around the world to understand each other’s systems of education and work force development. In that endeavor, the growing worldwide effort to include people with disabilities in all aspects of society behooves rehabilitation researchers from different countries to compare and contrast approaches to Vocational Rehabilitation at policy and direct service levels. Never before have scholars in the interdisciplinary field of rehabilitation had so many opportunities to collaborate with fellow scholars from other countries, and globally-minded rehabilitationists can find countless opportunities to share their ideas at international conferences and congresses. Work subscribers have the privilege of reading six issues per year of articles describing current research and best practices across the globe to promote positive employment outcomes, independence, and quality of life for people with disabilities. This special issue provides insights into Vocational Rehabilitation services and disability policy in Japan. Like the dynamic Japanese culture in general, services and supports for people with disabilities in Japan have changed dramatically over the past few decades. The excellent articles in this special issue bear witness to Japan’s innovative and forward-thinking national approach to ensuring that people with disabilities have an accessible and inclusive place in society. The purpose of this article is to highlight selected themes that emerge from the articles in this issue and compare and contrast current Vocational Rehabilitation trends in Japan with current Vocational Rehabilitation trends in the United States. It is a rare privilege to review the work of my friends and colleagues in Japan from my perspective as an American rehabilitation researcher and disability advocate.

This article analyses special issues, also referred to as thematic issues, monographic issues, or supplements, a mode of scientific journal publishing that has rarely been studied. It presents a bibliometric analysis of the production of journals in the field of communication in the period 2015–2019 and studies the impact of the publication of special issues in this field. The sample analysed includes 21,458 articles and reviews, 524 special issues, 418 publishers, and 94 journals. The study considers the presence of special issues in communication journals and the distribution and number of papers published in them and compares the impact of papers published in this mode with papers published in regular issues. The results reveal that 19% of articles and reviews published in the period studied appeared in special issues, which generally contain the same number of articles as regular issues. Moreover, 75% of journals achieved a higher average impact factor with articles published in special issues than they did with articles in regular issues. It is concluded that the publication of special issues appears to offer the potential benefits of attracting submissions, increasing profits, and improving impact, although it also has disadvantages. A reflection is offered on the strengths and weaknesses of this publishing practice.

We are pleased to present this special issue of Management Decision, the aim of which is to advance an in-depth understanding of the area of sustainability and ethical consumerism and to proffer new possibilities for future research. This topic has been drawing significant attention, more so in recent decades, as was evident in the large number of manuscripts that were submitted to this issue. We are delighted to introduce the ten articles in this special issue. Each of these papers furthers the understanding of sustainability and ethical consumerism and, together, they provide novel directions for future studies. We first explicate the main concepts that form the basis of this special issue: sustainability and ethical consumerism. We then provide an overview of the articles in this issue, highlighting various topics pertaining to this research area.

Guest Editorial NoteWomen’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East Marilyn Booth (bio) In her article for this special issue on “Women’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East,” historian Anshu Malhotra listens closely to a poetic work by the nineteenth-century north Indian prostitute turned spiritual novitiate Piro. Malhotra’s analysis of Piro’s poetic voice explores the microcosmic interstices of female agency as Piro’s world was entering the era of late colonial modernity. Women’s and gender history as a trans-cultural and by now global enterprise is built on such moments of listening to subjects in history, as it also attends to the macrocosmic conditions and shifts that have enabled and constrained such voices. Autobiographical writing, a mode of expression that has often made historians nervous, offers a rich if elusive archive for historical analysis, just as feminist biography as an analytic framework has been recognized, in the Journal of Women’s History and elsewhere, as a dynamic and generative zone of historical work. To consider autobiography through gendered lenses, as we do here, is to think through issues that face historians of women and gender constantly: not only agency and voice, but also self-definition, relationality, and the individual’s connections to specificities of time and place. The study of autobiography and gender has proliferated in the academy. It is a constellation that brings together issues of identity and performativity, the narrating I and the evasiveness of the gendered self, genre, and canonicity, and the intersectionality of gender, place, ethnicity, class, and embodiment in rhetorics of individualism and community. Thus, autobiographical writing and the analysis of it have become highly visible artifacts of and for cultural activism, political action, and scholarly endeavor. Globalization, translation, migrations, and localness as processes of worldly cultural circulation and as nodes of, or metaphors for, theoretical inquiry have focused attention on how individuals—and sometimes collective subjects—write “themselves” into histories of past and present. From memoirs that highlight and embed “Muslim woman-ness” to manifestoes that track sexed embodiment as blueprints for activism; and from the popularity of celebrity autobiographies in the transnational book market to performance art that foregrounds the elusive and ever-shifting contours and boundaries of embodied selves, autobiography has constituted a range of practices that fascinates as it confronts the reader, listener, or viewer with her own networks and aporias of identification. Whether the consumer is positioned as fan or as scholar (or perhaps most productively, as both), autobiography’s allure is nicely captured by the sociologist Mary Evans’s rubric for it: “missing persons.”1 Autobiography is a search for a moving [End Page 7] target, a movement among narrator, author, and reader within the semiotic webs through which all performances—and therefore formations—of self-hood take place. When art tries to capture lived moments through writing the self, and when self-understanding is engendered, complicated, and undermined by the acts of writing and reading about it, the reflexivity of autobiography creates connections and identifications. But autobiography also confronts the reader with the responsibility to listen differently: to respect otherness in its many varieties, to query identification constantly even as one also works toward it, to recognize that reading across human socialities in history and their particularities of self-making requires profound deference and humility. In this special issue, we explore questions of genre and “truth-effect,” asking in what ways can autobiography account for a lived life (or not) and still be considered as autobiography, and as history? What are its markers and boundaries? Is it infinitely expansive? How does autobiographical writing both incorporate and distance conventional and received models of selfhood in a given historical context, through models imagined, and genres constructed, in narration? How might “the self” look different not only across distinctions of gender identity and over time but also when we read from other places—and depending on where we stand as we listen? Ranging from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, from India to Iran (and its North American diaspora), Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, and Algeria, and then east again to Pakistan and Egypt in our three Roundtable essays, our contributions elicit...

Introduction to the Special Section This introduction outlines some of the key ideas about migration and identity that the multidisciplinary works in Korean studies in this special issue delve into, focusing on a few of the great many Korean migrations that have taken place over the last century and continue to do today. After contextualizing Korean migration historically and in contemporary times, it explores concepts and approaches that should be considered in framing human migration and introduces the articles in this special issue. All articles in this issue present multiple trajectories of Korean migrations while demonstrating how migrants in each group have established and reestablished themselves by embedding and connecting themselves both in their (ancestral) homeland and in the diaspora. By presenting a range of interdisciplinary works focusing on Korean migration and identity, this special issue seeks to highlight how migration fosters a variety of identities and agencies among those who live in (between) multiple homes and residency statuses. In so doing, it aims to spark discussion on the social and experiential plurality of Koreans at home and in the diaspora that mutually reinforces the ethnic complexity of Koreans, deserving as future topics of investigation in Korean studies.

Grid and P2P systems are different instances of distributed systems: while Grids are often motivated by intensive computations and required access to huge amounts of distributed data in a secure and trusted environment with quality of service guarantees, P2P systems are driven by large-scale dynamic collaborations in highly untrusted and unreliable environments. Since 2001, the Global and Peer to Peer Computing Workshop has been held annually along with the IEEE Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID) Conference to capture the fuzzy border between these areas and blur it even more, showing a much welcome exchange and enrichment of research ideas. The workshop popularity has increased continuously, making it one of the most successful workshops held at the CCGRID conference. This special issue includes extensions of the best papers of the 2005 workshop issue along with papers submitted directly to the journal. We received a total of 27 submissions and selected 7 papers for their high level scientific merits. One of the often cited differences between Grids and P2P systems is scale. While grids were traditionally developed around small and close professional communities, P2P systems were from the beginning intended to allow millions of anonymous users to share resources. However, the last years demonstrated an increased interest in scalable and large-scale grids. The articles in this special issue address the problem of larger grids from different directions, contributing ideas and software that may eventually take grids to truly global scale. The first direction is unrestricted participation: grids are often collaborations specialized on a set of predefined projects with limited access to participation. OurGrid, the system presented in “Labs of the World, Unite!!!”, is a free-to-join, already deployed peer-topeer grid. Anyone can join it to gain access to large amounts of computational power collected from the idle resources of all participants. Secure access to resources relies on an incentive mechanism that encourages participation and sharing, and uses virtual machines for resource isolation. An important problem stressed in large-scale systems is trust: while trust can be assumed through out of band means in small, controlled communities, it needs to be explicitly built and maintain in larger, more open groups. Two articles in this issue attack the problem of trust: in “Applying a Trust Brokering System to Resource Matchmaking in Public-Resource Grids,” Azzedin, Maheswaran and Mitra propose a trust J Grid Computing (2006) 4: 223–224 DOI 10.1007/s10723-006-9053-5

Coping and adaptation in challenging environments: Introduction to the special issue on development of boys and young men of color

Guest Editor’s Note Deborah R. Klevans (bio) Introduction The idea for this special issue of the Journal of General Education evolved from discussions with former JGE Editor James L. Ratcliff, who served on the steering committee for the Innovations in Distance Education (IDE) project. The IDE project was funded in large part by the AT&T Foundation and administered and led by The Pennsylvania State University’s Outreach and Cooperative Extension organization. The project’s outcomes depended on contributions not only from Penn State, but also from the 10 other large research institutions belonging to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)—or “Big Ten”—and eight smaller Historically Black Colleges and Universities. As manager of the IDE project, I am pleased to serve as guest editor of this special Journal issue. The project’s exposure in the Journal provides an opportunity for the participants to share some of its lessons and outcomes with other members of the higher education community. A description of the IDE project’s goals, components, procedures, and end-products sets the stage for the articles included in this publication. This special issue highlights the common interests of those committed to enhancing general education through exemplary and innovative teaching, and those attempting to bring distance education into the mainstream of higher education. What is Distance Education? The answer may seem obvious, but even a cursory review of the literature in this rapidly evolving area suggests that different definitions of distance education abound. The definition used by those involved in the IDE project most closely matches the one in the American Council on Education’s (ACE) Guiding Principles for Distance Learning, which was designed to guide institutional practice at the program level and was developed in cooperation with the [End Page vi] Alliance for Nontraditional Degree Programs (American Council on Education, 1996). As the ACE report notes, the document is written for both educators and trainers and is not limited to those in traditional education. Therefore, the authors chose to use the terms “learners” and “learning” rather than “students” and “teaching” to convey the intended range of participants. Although the contributors to this issue do not consistently use the terms preferred by ACE, those of us who focus on providing education to nontraditional students—as is often the case in distance education—find these terms highly appropriate. Ultimately, according to the ACE definition, distance learning/education is a system and a process that connects learners with distributed learning resources, and it is characterized by a separation of place or time or both between instructor and learner, between learners, between learners and learning resources, or all three. Interaction in distance education is conducted through one or more media that are not necessarily electronic. Background of the Innovations in Distance Education Project IDE was launched in 1995. This major initiative’s purpose was to help institutions of higher education create a supportive culture in which the possibilities of distance education might be more fully realized. There were two overarching goals for this 3-year undertaking, each represented by one of the two major project components: the Institutional Policy Initiative and the Faculty Development Initiative. The primary goal of the Institutional Policy Initiative was to identify and address institutional barriers so that distance education might flourish within institutions of higher education. The primary goal of the Faculty Development Initiative was to develop a set of principles and practices that would guide the work of faculty in developing quality distance education. Although the Faculty Development Initiative is this special issue’s focus, a description of the Institutional Policy component of the IDE project is included in this introduction to help explain the overall purpose of the project and the broader context within which the Faculty Development Initiative was undertaken. Information about the Institutional Policy Initiative may also be of interest to the reader concerned about how institutional policies and [End Page vii] procedures impact the instructional activities carried out by faculty, particularly as they apply to distance education. The Institutional Policy Initiative A series of three invitational symposia, which brought together leaders concerned with the role of distance education within higher education, achieved the goals of the policy initiative. Participants included...

Welcome to the special issue on selected papers from the ELECO-2013 Conference!, the 8th International Conference on Electrical and Electronics Engineering, held 28–30 November 2013, in Bursa-Turkey. ELECO conferences go back to 1986, when it was initially organized as national ELMEKSEM Electromechanical Conference by the Chamber of Electrical Engineers (EMO) Bursa Branch and upon that success repeated in 1988 and 1993 and 1997. The Bursa Branch has further gone on to organize a series of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Conferences in Bursa. ELECO conferences are organized at international level in odd numbered years and as national conferences in even numbered years, such as ELECO’2013 is the eight international conference which participants coming from various countries, presenting papers from the wide spectrum of electrical and electronics engineering. ELECO 2013 is jointly organized by Uludag University, Bursa; Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Istanbul and the Chamber of Turkish Electrical Engineers (EMO) Bursa Branch. The IEEE Region 8, IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Turkey section and The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey are co-sponsors of ELECO 2013. Taking the broad scope of the technical program, it is probably the largest electrical and electronics engineering conference ever held in Turkey. The scope of the conference covers topics ranging over electric power systems, electrical machines and drives, power electronics, high voltage techniques, electrical materials, electronics, circuits and systems, signal processing, electromagnetics, antennas and propagation, microwave theory, communication systems, mechatronics, control theory, control applications, automation systems, robotics and intelligent control systems. Two hundred and thirty five papers have been submitted for presentation and 138 papers have been accepted. If we look at the contributions with respect to geographical point of view, it is seen that ELECO 2013 contributions are coming from 17 different countries. Selected papers from previous international ELECO Conferences were invited to be published in extended form in special ELECO issues of international journals, under peer review. Three special ELECO issues appeared in the journal Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing containing selected papers from ELECO’2001, ELECO’2007 and ELECO’2011. Furthermore, four special ELECO issues appeared in the journal TJEECS: Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences where selected papers from ELECO’2003, ELECO’2005, ELECO’2007, and ELECO’2009 were published in extended form, respectively. This special issue on selected papers from ELECO’2013 contains extended versions of 12 papers presented at the conference, chosen among 19 recipients of the call for the papers for the special issue. All papers had to undergo the usual ALOG review process before they were finally accepted for this special issue. One of these papers is selected from invited talks given by world-known scientists during the conference. Six papers are selected from the papers presented in Special Session on Advances and New Design Possibilities for Analog Signal Processing. The other five are chosen from regular submitted manuscripts. H. H. Kuntman (&) S. Ozoguz O. Cicekoglu Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: kuntman@itu.edu.tr

Editor’s Note John N. Duvall This is my final issue as editor of MFS, and I’m pleased that my editor-ship ends with Paul B. Armstrong’s excellent special issue, “Cognitive Modernisms,” that follows. I began working as the associate editor of the journal in January 1999 and took over as editor in the summer of 2001. It’s been a privilege, a pleasure, and an education. Over the years, I’ve vetted more than 6,000 submissions and seen close to 600 essays (and twice as many book reviews) through production. I’ll miss reading those submissions that made me excited to turn the pages—even after the pages became virtual in our online submission system. I’ll miss the bonhomie of our little staff that always has taken pride in never missing a deadline for getting issues to Johns Hopkins University Press. I’ll even miss the impromptu meetings to discuss the minutia of a grammatical issue or to think through how we should cite some strange text not covered by the MLA Handbook. Much less will I miss asking for volunteer labor—readers for essays and book reviewers. I’ve made more than 20,000 such requests over the last two decades. I called not only on members of our splendid Editorial Board but also on hundreds of people with specialized knowledge related to various submissions. Thanks to each and every one of you who answered the call in the service of the profession. Without your intellectual input, MFS simply couldn’t operate. Beginning with Volume 69, Robert Marzec, my associate editor since fall 2007, will take over as editor. Bob took the lead in editing several special issues, most notably “Modern Fiction and the Ecological” (Fall 2009) and “Anthropocene Fictions” (Winter 2018). Joining [End Page 599] him as associate editor is our colleague, Maren Linett, who has twice guest-edited special issues—“Modernism’s Jews/Jewish Modernisms” (Summer 2005) and “Cripping Modernism” (Spring 2019). Without question, MFS will be in good hands for years to come. So many people have helped make MFS a crucial outlet for scholarship on modernist and contemporary fiction. Prior to Bob Marzec, Siobhan Sommerville and Nancy J. Peterson served as my associate editors. Over the years, I’ve relied on the dedicated labor of some of the very best of Purdue’s English doctoral students who have been my editorial assistants. More than simply correcting MLA citation and documentation, the editorial assistants wrote countless queries to authors so that the work appearing in our pages would be not only intellectually stimulating, but also clear, concise, and correct. Here’s a chronological list of the editorial assistants who worked for MFS during my editorship: Diana Gilroy, Celeste Hines, Angela Laflen, Geoffrey Stacks, Carol Fadda-Conrey, Martin Whitehead, Monica Osborne, Rebecca Nicholson-Weir, Michael Mauritzen, Jason Buchanan, Paul X. Rutz, Aaron DeRosa, Stella Setka, Jason Dodge, Rebekah Mitsein, Leah Pennywark, Shaun Clarkson, Marc Diefenderfer, Elizabeth Boyle, Daniel Froid, Alejandra Ortega, Narim Kim, Allyn Pearson, and Matt Morgenstern. “Thank you” doesn’t begin to express my gratitude. William Breichner, Director of the Journals Division at JHUP has always been great to work with. Thanks, Bill, for all you’ve done to support and promote MFS. And finally, kudos to our contributors. You made my job easy. I’ve always said that it would be hard to publish a bad issue because of the consistently high quality of the submissions that came across my desk. I’m not retiring and will remain a member of the Purdue Advisory Board of MFS. I may even read a submission now and then if Bob or Maren ask me. But for now, my work here is done. [End Page 600] Copyright © 2022 Purdue Research Foundation

The fifth generation (5G) wireless systems have been begun to be widely deployed over the world in recent years. As the 5G technology will not be able to meet the demands of the huge data traffic growth from massively interconnected devices that is forecasted for future years, the attention of the research community is shifting toward what will be the next innovations in wireless communication architectures and technologies for beyond 5G. The topic of beyond 5G wireless communication technologies has gained much momentum in the industry and the research community very recently. In this issue of IEEE Wireless Communications, we are pleased to present two Special Issues to bring together researchers, industry practitioners, and individuals working on the related areas to address some of these technical challenges for 5G and beyond wireless communication technologies. The Special Issue on “6G: The Paradigm for Future Wireless Communications” includes a collection of nine articles presented by Guest Editors S. Mumtaz, C. Jiang, A. Tölli, A. Al-Dulaimi, M. Butt, H. M. Asif, and I. Ashraf; the other Special Issue, on “Smart, Optimal, and Explainable Orchestration of Network Slices in 5G and Beyond Networks,” includes a collection of five articles presented by Guest Editors Z. M. Fadlullah, M. M. Fouda, K. Rabie, and R. Li. Thanks to the two Guest Editor teams who did an excellent job in editing these two Special Issues for our readers. Please stay tuned for new developments in the research area of beyond 5G wireless communication technologies, and read the editorials and the articles in the Special Issues.

This special issue of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, & Brain, entitled Performance Spaces for Music: Acoustical and Psychological Measurements and Their Interactions, is dedicated to Dr. Leo Beranek not only in acclaim of his 100th birthday in 2014 but also in recognition of his lifelong contributions to the field of architectural acoustics. The significance his work as a researcher, consultant, and author is manifested in countless ways and seems impossible to overestimate. His books, Music, Acoustics, and Architecture (1962), Concert Halls and Opera Houses: How They Sound (1996), and Concert Halls and Opera Houses: Music, Acoustics, and Architecture (2004), represent one of the most important textbook series in concert hall acoustics, and has significance far greater than the sum of its parts. The impetus from reading these works ranges from fuelling an individual's interest and enthusiasm for concert hall acoustics to building bridges between experts from different fields collaborating on concert hall projects, allowing both scientists and practitioners to figuratively stand upon Leo Beranek's giant's shoulders so as to see a little further.There is no doubt that the initial publication of Beranek's book in 1962 on concert hall acoustics triggered ongoing research on how sound is perceived in auditoria. This ranges from the initial works of Hawkes and Douglas (1971) in London, United Kingdom; the works by the Gottingen group (e.g., Gottlob, 1973); and research in Berlin, Germany; (Wilkens, 1977) to more recent works by Barron (1988) in the United Kingdom and Lokki, Patynen, Kuusinen, and Tervo (2012) in Finland. Their studies and many others have refined the fundamental ideas that Leo Beranek had put into discussion.Scientific research on panel reflector arrays, audience absorption of grazing sound (also known as the seat dip effect), and interaural cross correlation as a predictor of spatial perception of sound all carry the distinctive signature of Leo Beranek's work as a consultant on many outstanding projects. Just to name a few, these projects include the Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, the New National Theater (also in Tokyo), the Philharmonic Hall in New York, The Koussevitzky Music Shed (formerly The Tanglewood Music Shed) in Massachusetts, and the Frederic R. Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, Israel.To the present day, Leo Beranek is an active member of the acoustics community and continues to give lectures to an audience that eagerly absorbs the concepts he describes. One of the outstanding characteristics of these talks may be their clarity and the da Vinci-like simplicity that make the distinct multidisciplinarity of architectural acoustics seem easy to grasp. This achievement becomes clear when the diversity of the articles in this special issue are taken as a tangible example.This special issue begins with a biography that briefly chronicles Leo Beranek's life, illustrating the incredible development from his early days in farm-town Iowa to the present day being a world renowned expert of acoustics, a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, and the founder of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman-just to name a few corner points of his multifaceted career. In his article, Leo Beranek shows in an unparalleled way how a long experience in the field allows him to present complex relations in a clear way with a distinct view to the core essentials.The editors of this special issue are in debt to the authors who have provided such a circumferential collection of papers that are worth the reading. Moreover, the support and enduring commitment from all the reviewers was of great assistance to the authors and editors, who together brought this special issue to completion after months of hard work.Organization of the Contributions: The Communication ChainThe order of manuscripts in scientific periodicals is often categorized by the severity of the review process undergone. …

Guest Editor's Introduction:Historians and Histories of the Horn of Africa: Toward a Comparative View Federica Guazzini For we can get some idea of a whole from a part, but never knowledge or exact opinion. Special histories therefore contribute very little to the knowledge of the whole and conviction of its truth. It is only indeed by study of the interconnection of all the particulars, their resemblances and differences, that we are enabled at least to make a general survey, and thus derive both benefit and pleasure from history. Polybius, The Histories Although much has been written on the history and culture of the Horn of Africa, one of the most contentious, controversial, and important questions regarding the contemporary history of Africa still remains: what is the matter with the Horn? Examining cutting-edge issues in the ongoing redrawing of the political map of the Horn of Africa, the organizing committee of the international conference titled "The Horn of Africa between History, Law, and Politics" set as its goal the presentation of a rich and stimulating range of papers exploring the historical and contemporary meanings of the major changes the region has undergone. The articles in the present issue of Northeast African Studies are derived from papers presented at this conference. [End Page 1] The primary objective of the organizing committee was to examine the Horn of Africa's postindependence struggle to build transparent, accountable, and participatory governance structures, in order to predict scenarios of conflict resolution, new bases of cooperation, and modes and models of reconstruction of the legal and juridical systems in the region. Indeed, as Bereket Habte Selassie aptly underlined, the conference was "a bold and imaginative exercise in optimism" or, at least, a challenge to participants to adopt an international comparative perspective, which is of interest above all for its discussion of the major changes that have taken place since the imposition of European colonial rule on the Horn. Both African-born scholars and other experts were encouraged to attend the conference. The audience took an active part, and indeed the number of international scholars from different fields within the humanities and social sciences who participated in panel discussions reflects the lively interest resulting from the broad guidelines provided for the conference. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to publish in the present volume all the papers that were discussed. This edited collection confirms the insights of both mature and younger scholars, successfully demonstrating that the peoples of the Horn are much more complexly embedded in, and reflective of, interacting social and political processes than was understood by previous generations of scholars. Whereas historians and ethnologists of past decades tended to address each people separately, the panelists highlight the important interrelationships between groups. Each author tackles this interpretative challenge, providing different approaches, with thematic essays that strike a successful balance between political and social history. The Horn of Africa is thus increasingly treated as a cohesive area of study. The historical and social links between most of its constituent countries have always been strong. In part, this has been because of its colonial past, with Eritrea and Somalia among the Italian colonial possessions, Djibouti under French control, and Somaliland administered by Great Britain. Moreover, today these countries share a common destiny, in which the emerging political contours do not arouse much hope for the enhancement of international cooperation for peace and prosperity, for the rule of law and justice, for the gaining of support for [End Page 2] poverty alleviation. Thus, stabilizing the assessment of the past becomes a critical first step in reversing these expectations. The reader of this collection can particularly appreciate the collaboration of colleagues in their efforts to deal with political, anthropological, social, and legal questions, and in the fresh look they take at the way peoples, symbols, and ideas straddle the various regions of the Horn and at the clashes between these things in these regions. Common research questions raised during the conference focused on the institutional and cognitive structures resulting from such interactions. Among the topics included were the historical and current processes of construction of spaces of action and communication, as well as the processes of conflict and...