This is volume 54 issue 2 of Polity. Polity, the journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association, has been published quarterly since 1968. Among the leading general-interest journals in political science, Polity is guided by the premise that political knowledge advances through scholarly exchange across subfield boundaries and even beyond disciplinary borders. Polity publishes original research on all aspects of political life, especially those that converge around questions of race, gender, class, colonialism, and empire.