This issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics is dedicated to Radu Balescu on the occasion of his 65th birthday.

Of the more than 170 articles published worldwide by Professor Balescu to date, more than 25 have been published in this journal. Readers of the Journal of Plasma Physics will thus be well acquainted with his contributions to the study of the interplay between plasma turbulence and the theory of transport phenomena in magnetically confined plasmas. A vast community of students, teachers and researchers will also have read or consulted the many monographs, five to date, written by Balescu and world-famous for their clarity. In his first monograph, Statistical Mechanics of Charged Particles (Interscience, New York), published in 1963, the whole of plasma physics, including the transport equation to which his name will remain attached, was put into the broader context of statistical physics. The monograph Equilibrium and Non-Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics (Wiley-Interscience, New York) followed in 1975, and still inspires many teachers today.