The volume includes most of the contributions to a meeting on recently completed or ongoing research projects concerning the "small" Horn of Africa, that is Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, held in Hamburg in May 2002, as well as a few complementary articles. Contributions are widely diversified, as the Hamburg meeting had gathered young scholars from German universities working on extremely different themes. The subjects range widely from Agro-Anthropology to Political Science, with Sociology and Social Anthropology enjoying the strongest coverage.