The introduction of this issue goes back over the history of the creation of the Lusotopie journal. It also questions the scope of the concept of lusotopy in the social sciences. The intellectual project of the journal, published from 1994 onwards, was complex and ambitious. Lusotopie is not a review of "cultural-area" studies, but a generalist review of political analysis, in the broadest sense, from an empirically-delimited research field: that of the area drawn by Portuguese history and colonization. It was both to escape the contemporary neo-imperial approach of "Lusophony" and to overcome the simply negative criticism of the ideology of Lusophony (in its literary, political and economic aspects), which as such does not provide a tool for understanding the realities produced by history.