The 2016 virtual edition of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review explores avenues of inquiry surrounding the topic of futures in political and legal anthropology. It highlights how the deployment of the future as an analytical tool facilitates particular claims about temporality, possibility, and the ramifications of historical events and imaginaries.

This discussion of futures comes at a time when the world faces challenges of unprecedented scale and complexity and when uncertain—or all-too-certain—futures are continually found at the center of political unrest and legal negotiations globally. We thus hope that this virtual edition creates productive avenues for thinking about futurity and the political.

The Virtual Edition is organized and introduced by Jessica Bray and Lindsay Vogt, both of whom are Digital Editorial Fellows. It features original articles and postscripts by Alice Bellagamba, Catherine Besteman, Elena Glasberg, Sami Hermez, Kathleen Lowrey, Amanda T. Snellinger, Mayssoun Sukarieh, and Chika Watanabe.

The eight original articles published in PoLAR are free to access until mid-December 2016.