The relationship between culture and policy has long been a major topic for media and cultural studies. With
this issue, we hope to broaden the meaning of cultural policy, from policies that are explicitly regulating
something we call the “cultural” (including media or traditional rituals or symbols) to include the practice of
policy-making and the cultural legitimation of law and policy itself, regardless of the object or dimension of
social life it regulates. The essays in this issue argue for (or at least accept) an understanding of policy as a
cultural production representing certain ideological outlooks, and thus implicitly suggest that cultural policy
studies should encompass a wide range of policies; at the same time, the essays are interested in the cultural
mechanisms and means through which policies are promulgated and enforced – from think tanks to social
media flak, from the global circulation of ideologies to the local practices of appropriation/resistance.