In April 2017 the editorial board of Russian Sociological Review announced a call for papers for its regular annual special issue. We invited scholars from a broad range of social science disciplines to reflect on one of the core problems of sociology — social order. The papers collected here are valuable contributions to their respective fields covering this more general one. We selected them from many proposals and draft manuscripts under a meticulous procedure of peer-review but, while being satisfied with the result of this selection, we cannot but confess a slight disappointment reconsidering our own starting point. It seems less sophisticated now; we could have got more diverse papers if we formulated better what we aimed to achieve