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Abstract: This special issue offers papers that together reach toward sociological understanding of “meaning.” We contextualize that effort in intersecting intellectual trends—the emerging relational sociology of networks and meanings, which has progressed steadily since the 1990s, and the diverse enterprise of sociology of language, which is much less established in the U.S. Given space limitations, we acknowledge others’ work but concentrate on Harrison White''s turn to language and linguistics, which influenced all the papers herein. We highlight each paper''s contribution to a new relational sociology and new understanding of language as mechanism and methodology, which might change the study of agentic actions, social processes, politics, networks and institutions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper is an attempt to explain how the American strategy regarding Iraq has broken up the social fabric and led to a state of disorder, which the American administration has failed to address after six months since the fall of Baghdad. This paper also underscores multiple discriminations against Iraqi women from the re-emerging tribal and religious parochialisms, which the occupation forces and the Iraqi Governing Council tolerate, thus encouraging the atmosphere of atavistic recidivism that is prevalent in neighboring Gulf States. Further, the policies pursued by successive United States administrations, have been cynically pragmatic and devoid of any humanitarian impulse or consciousness, trapping the Iraqi people between dictatorship and privation.