The COVID-19 pandemic has informed the sociological agenda for almost two years now. Since the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, the mainstream sociological focus has shifted towards the ways pandemic mediates conventional research problems such as globalization and inequality, state and civil society, politics and democracy, etc. Many academic publishers are now busy producing an enormous body of sociological literature reflecting on the social and cultural meanings of COVID-19 and its implications to social life. 

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

At the beginning of this year, the editorial team of the Russian Sociological Review and the Centre for Fundamental Sociology announced the special issue with a call for papers “Friendship, Trust, and Conflict: From Conceptual History Towards Studies of Social Ontology.”