In an age of transition, such as ours, the role of the imaginary in the production and reproduction of social order is becoming ever more important. In his The Time of the Tribes, the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli "the imaginary is increasingly granted a role in structuring society" (1996: 118). This issue aims to contribute to the ongoing debates on this issue. Section I examines how, on a macro level, changing and persisting imaginaries of empire structure, or at least delimit, the space within which processes of regulation, control, and repression take place. Particular attention is paid to emerging global neoliberal imaginaries and to traces of surviving colonialism and orientalism in the regulation and control of crime and terror. In Section II, the focus is on how, on a micro level, particular groups who find themselves enmeshed in conditions of rapid social and cultural transition, imagine communities, negotiate identity, and invent resistance. Contributions explore bourgeois identities, Colombian youth, migrants' tactics and negotiations, and imaginary criminal identities. Finally, Section III examines how, on a meso or institutional level, imaginaries of regulation and control gradually emerge and how they seem to be structuring or delimiting regulatory policies and interventions. At the center of analysis are media images of otherness and exclusion, imaginaries of corporate and state control, and victim ideology.