The future of Policy Futures in Education

It is a very humbling and exciting experience for any scholar to become Editor-in-Chief of a journal that has reached its 14th volume and boasts eight published issues per year, and to be part of and supported by the major publishing house – SAGE. In the past 13 volumes, this journal has flourished and gone from strength to strength under the editorship of Michael A. Peters. It is our sincere hope that with the continuous support of the editorial board and associate editors, Policy Futures in Education will continue to challenge contemporary conditions in education and academia, and make an important contribution to policy research. What has become clear in the past 13 volumes of this journal is that policies govern our being in this world. They remain a defining set of agreed principles by governing bodies that guide our decision-making to achieve particular outcomes that are supposed to better our existence and conditions in this world. In the education sector these policies fulfil particular intentions, and are performed by the governing bodies at local, national and international levels. Striving for change and the greater good, policies also attract much criticism and interest from various parties. In other words, policies are important to public institutions, to the private sector, as well as to individuals. The education sector is permeated with policies that govern both institutions and subjects. There is a strong connection, perhaps stronger than just in an etymological sense, between policy and the words polis, police and politics. Regulations and surveillance have impacted the way that they are resisted by different groups, as well as how they allow for performances in productive spaces, and grant particular rights or programmes. Policies guide us to particular desired outcomes. In this sense, in this editorial I would like to argue the point of multiple ways of thinking and interrogating the concerns around policy through the notion of power in relation to policy, from both the well-known work of Foucault, and the less well-known work of Havel. Foucault’s (1980) work on power and its relationship with institutions are well used in policy studies. The Foucauldian question of ‘how’ can lead research and critique of the contemporary conditions, and it could guide the examination of techniques and instruments that are indispensable to the way government agencies conduct themselves in policy developments. Foucault has gifted us the idea that the traditional model of a juridical power construct claims that power belongs to someone, as it can be possessed by a class