Editorial for issue 31.1

Accordingly, the editors emphasised the multidisciplinary, as well as interdisciplinary, nature of the enterprise and extended a welcome to articles of all kinds - theoretical, contemporary empirical, comparative, historical—from scholars of every discipline in the humanities and social sciences. Although the field of nationalism has expanded and diversified, these founding goals remain. To mark this anniversary, we will publish two virtual issues. The first is the initial issue of the journal, edited by Anthony D. Smith, the two ASEN Chairs, Athena Leoussi, and Obi Igwara, and Terry Mulhall. The second is a collection of the annual Nations and Nationalism lectures in honour of Ernest Gellner and of Anthony D. Smith. As one would expect, the journal has changed as the field of nationalism has developed. We see this in the form of the emergence of new topics (such as radical right populism and the impact of the digital), new methodologies, and the increasing specialisation of articles. However, we retain our commitment as a centre of intellectual exchange and as a forum in which fundamental theoretical approaches can be developed and debated. Hence, we publish on a regular basis Exchanges, Viewpoint articles, Gellner/Smith lectures by leading scholars and Debates on major monographs and Themed Sections. This issue contains an Exchange on radical right nationalism and a Themed Section on ‘Nationhood and Mechanisms of Solidarity’, Guest Edited by Danny Kaplan. Several other Themed Sections are in the pipeline. We continue to receive a gratifying flow of submissions, and our articles score well in the metrics, for what that is worth. In 2023 our CiteScore (Scopus) was 3.6; our Journal Citation Indicator (Clarivate) was 2.18; and our Journal Impact Factor was 1.5. We ranked 6/518 History Q1, 133/317 Q2 Political Science, 102/217 Q2 Sociology and 16/39 Q2 Ethnic Studies. There are some changes to the editorial team. We welcome the appointments of ASEN President Jonathan Hearn as a fourth Editor-In-Chief, and of Bart Bonikowski, Gezim Krasniqi, Nicola Miller and Maya Tudor to the editorial team. Gezim is our new Book Review editor. We would like to thank our retiring team members for their services to the journal, Madura Rasaratnam, and Sarah Correia. Thanks are also due to John Breuilly who was interim Book Review editor after Sarah's resignation. We are deeply indebted to the members of our outgoing International Advisory Board for their considerable unpaid advisory services over many years. Without such public-spirited dedication, it would be difficult to maintain the standards of our journal. We will report in due course on our new IAB. The 34th annual ASEN conference takes place on the banks of the Danube at Central European University's Budapest campus from 23 to 25 April 2025 on Nationalism and Borders. This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great theorist of nationalism, Ernest Gellner. The conference is an occasion for assessing his achievement. Michael Mann will deliver the biennial Ernest Gellner lecture. The Anthony D. Smith prize is awarded annually for an outstanding article published each year. The 2024 winner was X published in Issue X. The 2024 Dominique Jacquin–Berdal Prize was awarded to Vuk Vukotić for his article, ‘Are languages and dialects inventions of nationalism? On the problem of totalising metalanguage’, published in Vol 30 Issue 4. We end on a sad note. We report the deaths of John Stone, the distinguished scholar of race and ethnicity, and of Thomas Hylland Eriksen, an ethnographic theorist of great originality in bridging the fields of ethnicity and nationalism. Both were loyal friends of our journal and will be dearly missed. We will publish an appreciation of them in a future issue. We thank our editorial colleagues and the Wiley team who have played their part in enabling this publication. We are especially grateful to our managing editor, Seeta Persaud, who in spite of a heavy workload has once again steered the journal with calm efficiency.