<p>This special issue critically examines political power and the middle classes in a landscape of uncertainty. It explores how the middle classes, once emblematic of policymakers’ optimism generated by neoliberal expansion and expected democratization, now navigate a milieu overshadowed by the rise of authoritarianism, escalating violence, and deepening inequality. This paradigm shift is not merely a shift in sentiment, but also an important transformation in contemporary patterns of governance, and therefore poses new possibilities for anthropological research that have the potential to explain the role of the middle class in promoting, consolidating, and challenging authoritarian governance structures. We approach the middle class not as a monolithic, unchanging entity, but as a dynamic, relational construct that is continually shaped and reshaped by ongoing power struggles and structural positions within the socio-historical fabric. In highlighting the heterogeneity of the groups that can be identified as the middle class, we prefer to speak about the “middle classes” in plural. This perspective challenges traditional analysis of the middle-class’ political behavior that is premised on understanding them as rational agents driven by self-interest and pragmatism and offers a more multifaceted understanding of their historical engagement with political power, encompassing various forms of alliance and opposition. The papers in this issue span a range of geopolitical contexts, each with its own trajectory of authoritarian rule and paths toward liberalization. We are particularly interested in the middle classes’ strategies of social reproduction, that is, in the ways in which individuals and groups seek to maintain and improve their living conditions in social, economic, political, and cultural spheres. These strategies connect micro-level personal endeavors and broader, macro-level processes directed by socioeconomic policies and power relations. The special issue critically examines how these strategies of social reproduction are both influenced by and shape the multiple interactions of the middle classes with state power, particularly under various shades of authoritarian regimes.</p>