Welcome to the Policy Studies Yearbook Annual Review 2022–23, which I am proud to announce that, from this year onward, is to be published as an annual special issue of Politics & Policy (P&P). Pioneered by P&P's longtime sister journal, the Policy Studies Journal (PSJ), over a decade ago, the Policy Studies Yearbook is a unique twin-pronged project designed to: first, connect a large, international, and multidisciplinary body of policy scholars and practitioners via the Yearbook directory; and second, to disseminate the best of their research in contemporary policy developments, commentaries, and exceptional reviews of the policy literature in the Yearbook annual publication. I hope that readers of, and contributors to, Politics & Policy will find both the Yearbook directory and its Annual Review as interesting and useful for their professional networking and research activities as past contributors and readers did when it was published as an annual issue of the PSJ. Under Hank Jenkins-Smith's editorship, in the late 2010s, the PSJ broke new ground in developing an innovative networking platform designed especially for policy scholars, practitioners, and students to showcase their latest research lists, connect with each other, and publish their latest research—particularly research coauthored by faculty and advanced graduate students. The culmination of this project coalesced into the Yearbook Annual Review, which from 2009 to 2019 was published by Prof. Jenkins-Smith as a special issue of the PSJ. Continuing that great tradition, it is my pleasure and privilege to see the Yearbook move to a similar arrangement with P&P. It is a move that makes perfect sense given the academic prestige that P&P has achieved over the years and its focus on allying rigorous academic research with practical policy implications across a wide variety of policy subfields. What makes P&P stand out well beyond other policy journals regarding the Yearbook, however, is its longstanding commitment to assisting early career scholars in publishing their research and building their professional network. These have always been pivotal to the Yearbook's goals and make P&P an excellent new home for the Yearbook's twin project. As the many existing members of the directory know, the growing needs of the Yearbook directory were fulfilled by moving it in 2021 to a new, updated, and standalone website at psoyearbook.org—where the directory platform is now managed. On this platform, policy scholars, policy practitioners, and advanced graduate students can stay current on recent research in their subfield by uploading their profile, affiliations, research areas, and lists of publications—old and new. Members can use the directory to get connected and stay that way. But the directory is far more than a simple contacts list. You can use its searchable database to promote your latest research to exactly the right people, find new colleagues and research collaborators, identify experts in highly specialized areas, establish your peer reviewer niche (and link it to other sites), identify potential peer review panel members,1 nominate preferred peer reviewers when submitting articles to journals, shortlist potential faculty, convene integrated conference panels, contact policy practitioners in your subfield, or select compatible graduate supervisors—among many other things. If you are not already a member, it is free and easy to sign up and get connected—just follow the simple instructions on the homepage at psoyearbook.org. We send an annual email reminder to visit/update your Yearbook directory profile to ensure it remains current so you can connect quickly with the policy people you need to know (and those who need to know you)! All past issues of the Yearbook Annual Review can now be accessed free of charge in one click on the homepage at psoyearbook.org. For eleven years, the Review was published by Wiley as a supplemental issue of the PSJ. A central focus was to provide a platform for encouraging and educating early career scholars in the procedures and stringent standards required to become successful in getting their work published in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. The Yearbook therefore featured articles coauthored by faculty and graduate students with a heavy focus on reviewing the recent policy literature and meta-analyses concerning that literature—an excellent way to assist doctoral students to get the most out of their thesis literature review endeavors! Last year's expanded Review likewise offered engaging scholarly reviews of the recent literature for which the Yearbook became renowned under PSJ editorship. It also widened its aims, scope, and readership base to also include original articles and commentaries on recent policy developments in single countries and cross-nationally. Research coauthored with graduate students is still very much welcomed and prioritized, but is not a requirement for acceptance. As the first Yearbook special issue of P&P, this 13th issue similarly combines detailed literature review articles and graduate-faculty coauthored pieces with original research and commentaries on recent policy developments, including the extremely timely areas of immigration, artificial intelligence, abortion policy, gun policy, and conflict in the Middle East. The past 12 Yearbooks all included review articles summarizing recent scholarship in specific policy subfields. This year's Yearbook Annual Review is no exception. Our first four articles comprise the most exceptional of the state-of-the-policy-art analytical reviews we received in this area. The last five pieces are topical extended commentaries and original research articles that focus on some of the most pressing policy areas in the United States and beyond over the last few years. In our first article, Robles and Mallinson (2022–23) use their outstanding systematic review to flag the inconsistent public policy that currently regulates artificial intelligence (AI) and to underline the need for a coherent, yet adaptable, AI governance model to guide policy and administration scholars and practitioners. In “Catching Up With AI: Pushing Toward a Cohesive Governance Framework,” Robles and Mallinson not only offer a comprehensive review of the extant research on the subject. They also discuss the recent explosion in government applications of AI and debates concerning its use and potential misuse that serves as an excellent introduction to this burgeoning policy arena. The article then formulates a promising AI governance framework designed to be adaptable to fast-growing new technologies and proposes a solid and engaging research agenda for the near future. Given recent advances in AI technology, and well-grounded concerns about its future regulation that have, in the last couple of months, vexed policy practitioners, moral philosophers, academics, and Elon Musk himself (see Narayan et al., 2023), this review article is an exceptionally timely contribution—both to the Yearbook and to contemporary policy making. Our second article, entitled “The Evolution of Systematic Evidence Reviews: Past and Future Developments and Their Implications for Policy Analysis,” similarly offers a systematic review that highlights the key place of evidence meta-analyses in the context of policy analysis. Authors Lemire and others (2022–23) examine the past as well as envision the future concerning different kinds of evidence reviews as forms of policy analysis and critical sources of evidence within the policy process. This wide-ranging article serves as a valuable, detailed introduction to the varied evidence synthesis approaches and their relative benefits and limitations for policy analysis—a must for doctoral tutorials. It also underlines the centrality of these approaches to defining rigorous research and research agendas, supporting grant applications, and how they inform the implementation of policy practices. In the third article this year, María Victoria Whittingham (2022–23) examines “Public Policy Research in Colombia: State of the Art (Phase 1), 2008–18.” The author provides an in-depth, systematic review and classification (rather impressively by field, theoretical and methodological approach, transversal categories, and more) of more than 1000 policy research papers published over a decade in Colombia—where a complex political arena and grave social problems have led to questioning the quality and strength of its democracy. Whittingham argues that the national capacity for producing relevant and thorough research in public policy, theory, and practice, is a key element for the quality of its democracy and the sustainability of the system. Her preliminary findings identify key areas where policy research in Colombia requires expansion, deepening, and diversification to enhance democratic development and intellectual capital. Her findings are also intended to encourage scholarly research and reflection on how similar studies in other countries, especially in the Global South, could be used to identify common questions and hopefully build common answers in policy studies and policy development. The manner in which this last point is made—in addition to the article's other strong merits—formed a key reason it was selected among the many submissions for publication in the Yearbook this year. It demonstrates particularly well how (with a bit of effort and lateral thinking) specialists in a very focused area can nevertheless widen out the implications of their research to appeal to, and be immediately useful for, scholars in different subfields, or country areas. As an editor of policy journals for the last 18 years, this is still a requirement (especially for generalist journal articles like those of P&P) that I seldom see well executed until the reviewers or I push for it to be included in revised and resubmitted papers. And when it is executed well, it certainly increases the wider reach and impact, readability, publishability, and longevity of one's published research. Moving to the realms of more recent policy developments, the last four years have seen an unprecedented increase in gun violence in the United States (see Gramlich, 2022), particularly regarding mass shootings like the high-profile events of May 2022 in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York. Our next article is the first of two pieces in this Yearbook Annual Review that focus on gun policy in a year that has been the second worst for mass shootings in the United States, behind 2021, since the Gun Violence Archive began recording gun violence data in 2013 (Bushard, 2022). Schwartz (2022–23) tackles this extremely serious issue in his excellent review article entitled “Taking Stock: The Contribution of Policy Studies to Our Understanding of Gun Policy.” Examining gun policy scholarship in the top policy journals over the decade between Sandy Hook in 2012 to 2022, Schwartz finds that policy scholars have made significant progress in identifying the variables that explain when gun control policies are likely to be adopted, or rejected, by legislatures. He nevertheless, and very persuasively, contends that firearms policy must no longer be treated only as a case study or variable, but as an important policy area in its own right. He ends with some sound suggestions for areas where the discipline can contribute more to our understanding of this vitally important regulatory issue by developing robust and multidimensional evaluations of firearms policies. Our next piece, by Merry (2022–23), follows with a poignant extended commentary situating gun policy within the U.S. political context in 2022 and the first significant change to federal gun legislation since the 1990s. Drawing on agenda setting and information processing theories, Merry argues in “The Prospects for Gun Policy Change Following Mass Shootings” that, while many frame this policy change as a clear break from the long-standing pattern of inaction on gun violence, no fundamental alteration in how the U.S. political system responds to gun injury and death has yet occurred. She also highlights changes in public opinion and in the interest group landscape that have the potential to transform the politics of gun policy as well as underscoring several near-term expectations for gun policy making, particularly at the state level. Abortion policy resurfaced as another critical issue in the United States in 2022. In the next contribution to this year's Yearbook Annual Review, Professor Emeritus Skidmore's (2022–23) erudite extended commentary, “Abortion: Reactionary Theocracy Rises in America, while Declining Elsewhere,” examines critically the ethics, the logic, the partisanship, and the history underpinning abortion policy in the United States. Skidmore details the deep ramifications for equality, freedom, and democracy as we know it embodied in the June 2022 Supreme Court ruling that officially reversed the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling on the constitutional right to abortion. Garrett and Sementelli (2022–23) discuss recent immigration policy in the United States in “Revisiting the Policy Implications of COVID-19, Asylum Seekers, and Migrants on the Mexico–U.S. Border: Creating (and Maintaining) States of Exception in the Trump and Biden Administrations.” Using Agamben's notion of the state of exception, they argue that the pandemic provided an ideal environment for creating scenarios that have violated the human rights of asylum seekers, refugees, migrants, and their children. They also highlight that Biden's immigration policies in 2021–2022 have done little to effectively alter Trump's draconian measures that destabilized the Mexico–U.S. border—with wide-ranging repercussions for sovereignty, legitimacy, and hegemony. Our final two pieces focus on recent developments concerning the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and peace initiatives in the Middle East. Lazin's (2022–23) commentary assesses “President Donald Trump's Abraham Accords Initiative: Prospects for Israel, the Arab States, and Palestinians.” Lazin highlights the winners and losers of the Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and several Middle Eastern countries facilitated by the United States. He also discusses the factors motivating Trump's handling of the initiative and its worrisome ramifications for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, given that the Accords may become a means by which Israel avoids dealing with the status of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Continuing the focus on the Middle East, in the final article in this year's Yearbook Review Alon Ben-Meir (2022–23) contributes “Psychological Impediments Are at the Core of The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.” In it he identifies the psychological dimension as a critical factor contributing to the increasingly intractable nature of the 73-year-old unresolved conflict. Based on his long career as an academic as well as an involved policy practitioner in the peacemaking efforts, Ben-Meir contends that, despite the centrality of land disputes, any mitigation of the conflict requires a keen examination of the elements that inform the psychological dimension—psychological resistance, historical experience/perception, entrenched ideologies, mutual delegitimization, and religious conviction. He goes on to elaborate that alleviating them are fundamental prerequisites to finding viable conflict resolution, whether it be a two-state solution or the confederation alongside Jordan he proposes. ACTION: Please bookmark the new Yearbook website at http://www.psoyearbook.org/directory/ and easily update your profile there. I hope you enjoy our new Policy Studies Yearbook articles for 2022–2023 and join me in celebrating its extremely fitting new alliance with the P&P community. I encourage you to create your own profile in the Yearbook directory membership (just click the link “Get Listed”) to receive all our updates about the directory and annual publication calls for papers (our next call for papers is also reproduced below). Or click on “directory” on the homepage to add a new profile or update an existing profile on http://www.psoyearbook.org/directory/. Simply go to Yearbook Members > Update Information, enter the email address associated with your profile, and add your latest contact details and published works. If you no longer have access to the address you signed up with, no problem. Just follow the instructions to reset. Please note that, for security reasons, Yearbook staff check and approve new profiles before they go live, but updates should be instantaneous. Please also ask your colleagues to add their profiles if they have not already done so. I very much look forward to working together with you and P&P in the future! The call for papers for the upcoming 2023–24 Yearbook Annual Review in P&P can be found below. If you have any queries or suggestions for new features, you would like to see the Yearbook directory fulfill, or if you wish to submit a paper for consideration in the 2023–24 Yearbook Annual Review, please email me at [email protected] or via the P&P Editorial Office at [email protected]. Dr. Emma R. Norman Editor, Policy Studies Yearbook [email protected] Managing Editor, P&P [email protected] We are now calling for papers for the 2023–24 Yearbook Annual Review. Review article submissions for the 2023–24 issue summarizing recent policy scholarship in specific policy subfields, or articles and shorter commentaries focusing on recent practical policy developments should be emailed to the editor at [email protected] no later than August 12, 2023. Or, if you prefer, contact the editor via a brief email at [email protected], flagging your submission to the 2023–24 Yearbook to receive instructions on how to submit in Manuscript Central: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/polpol. In the past, the content of the Policy Studies Yearbook Annual Review included short review articles summarizing the most recent scholarship in specific policy subfields. We will continue to publish, now and in the future, such articles on the state of the academic literature. From 2021 the Yearbook Annual Review broadened its aims and scope to also include articles and shorter commentaries that critically discuss key practical policy developments of the previous year (or last few years). Such articles and commentaries may focus on either one policy area across several countries or states, or policy developments in a single country or region (one policy area or related areas). Many policy developments and mis-developments have been particularly momentous since 2020 concerning the global pandemic and beyond: international aid and cooperation, crisis response, democratic accountability, electoral procedures, economic recovery, trade restrictions/opportunities, public diplomacy, global leadership, great powers and grand strategies, e-commerce, remote learning, border controls, freedom of movement/association, regional fragmentation, globalization and its discontents, and a host of other areas. The practical policy areas the editor is interested in considering include, but are not restricted to, these fields. There is, of course, much to be said concerning the lightning speed of many policy developments over the last four years, both within and between states. It is the aim of future Yearbook Annual Reviews to publish the best articles and commentaries in key policy areas and provide a spirited forum for future discussion, comment, critique, and careful connection to the most recent academic advancements in the literature. Pieces coauthored between faculty and graduate students, or authored by early career scholars, are especially welcome. Publication is open to all scholars who conduct research in public policy, including independent scholars, faculty professors, advanced graduate students, and policy practitioners. Submissions undergo rigorous double-blind peer review. State–of–the–literature and original research articles should be around 8–9000 words in total, including abstracts and Chicago style Author-Date citations and reference list. Shorter commentaries are welcome but should be appropriately referenced throughout with the sources of all claims/data cited (reference list at the end), offer balanced and critical perspectives on a current policy issue and its handling (or mishandling), and conclude with practical policy suggestions drawn from the preceding discussion. Clear, clean, jargon-free writing is, of course, mandatory. Strictly, submissions should NOT be published or under consideration elsewhere. If in any doubt, please email the editor a proposal for consideration first. Yearbook Annual Review articles are now published as an annual special issue of Politics & Policy and will be granted special open access status for two months after publication—regardless of whether your institution or country has an open access agreement with Wiley. All Yearbook articles will be linked in the listings within the Yearbook website as well as in specialized Wiley marketing plans to facilitate access to current policy research. They will also be linked on the Policy Studies Organization (PSO) website at https://ipsonet.org and listed in the PSO curriculum project searchable article database along with the many other articles published in PSO journals such as: the Policy Studies Journal, Review of Policy Research, Politics & Policy, World Affairs, Policy & Internet, and Asian Politics & Policy.