This issue has a dual, but related focus: structural forces in the form of dominance based on race and gender within the U.S. and the integrative mechanisms operating at the hemispheric and global levels that reproduce global poverty and North-South disparities. This ensemble of forces conditions the tasks facing communities of resistance. In a period of apparent setbacks, contributors to this issue offer glimmers of hope and modest policy proposals that could help advance an agenda for promoting racial equality, reducing interethnic conflict and violence against women, and beginning to visualize a notion of civil society at a hemispheric level.