Book excerpt: A "Sonderforschungsbereich" (SFB) is a programme of the "Deutsche For schungsgemeinschaft" to financially support a concentrated research effort of a number of scientists located principally at one University, Research La boratory or a number of these situated in close proximity to one another so that active interaction among individual scientists is easily possible. Such SFB are devoted to a topic, in our case "Deformation and Failure in Metallic and Granular M aterialK' , and financing is based on a peer reviewed proposal for three (now four) years with the intention of several prolongations after evaluation of intermediate progress and continuation reports. An SFB is terminated in general by a formal workshop, in which the state of the art of the achieved results is presented in oral or I and poster communications to which also guests are invited with whom the individual project investigators may have collaborated. Moreover, a research report in book form is produced in which a number of articles from these lectures are selected and collected, which present those research results that withstood a rigorous reviewing pro cess (with generally two or three referees). The theme deformation and failure of materials is presented here in two volumes of the Lecture Notes in Applied and Computational Mechanics by Springer Verlag, and the present volume is devoted to granular and porous continua. The complementary volume (Lecture Notes in Applied and Com putational Mechanics, vol. 10, Eds. K. HUTTER & H.