“Political Power and Social Theory” is an annual review, committed to advancing our interdisciplinary, critical understanding of the linkages between social relations, political power, and historical development. Alongside peer-reviewed chapters dealing with a diversity of topics, this volume contains a special section on the politics of the ‘new middle class’ in the global south and post-socialist societies. Over the past few decades, globalization and urbanization have contributed to the development of a newly educated urban middle class around the world, but this new class has been rarely studied. Filling this void, the chapters in this section examine the middle classes in the developing world in areas as diverse as the Middle East, India, South Africa, the former Soviet Union, and Latin America. This is one of the only volumes examining the new urban middle classes in emerging economies. Exploring identity-formation, social change, urbanization and politics among the new middle class, the chapters together offer new insights on this understudied social group and raise provocative questions about politics and social change in the early 21st century around the globe.

It is an exciting time to consider changes in the field of comparative-historical sociology, as the discipline seeks to accommodate both old and new trends as well as the transforming spatial scales in which political power and social theory are increasingly embedded. Volume 20 of “Political Power and Social Theory” starts the ball rolling by showcasing articles that pursue similar themes. The question of what is old and what is new hovers over most of the contributions, particularly the peer-reviewed chapters in parts I and II, which consider such long-standing socio-historical concerns as power structure theory, class-based collective action, and empire – but examine them through new conceptual, methodological, and historical lenses. This year’s volume also offers a critical treatment of the spatial or territorial dynamics of state hegemony, class power, ideologies of governance, and citizenship – with the latter theme most well developed in debate over the new geographies of citizenship in the Scholarly Controversy Section as well as in part-II’s guest-edited section on Empire and Colonialism.

As economic stagnation freezes the globe; capitalism is increasingly questioned; war, revolution and political instability unsettles the Middle East; and President Obama’s campaign for the Presidency looms, Volume 23 of Political Power and Social Theory reflects on these and related issues. Chapters in this volume discuss the meaning of revolution, the origins of neoliberalism in India, identity formation in a Chicago social movement, the Palestinian National Question, and the Black middle-class in the US. Additionally, in the Scholarly Controversy section, Fred Block questions whether the concept of “capitalism” should be problematized entirely.