Contemporary Malaysia is a society in ferment. For years, the country has been led by the Barisan Nasional, a political coalition anchored by the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). Once believed to be unassailable, in the March 2008 general election the Malaysian opposition managed to deny Barisan its hitherto customary two-thirds parliamentary majority while also prying several state governments from its control. The momentum of the opposition's electoral success carried over into the 2013 election, when they inflicted a major blow on the incumbent coalition by winning the majority vote, even if the latter still managed to retain power by way of the first-past-the-post parliamentary process.

As the country stands at the cusp of another impending general election (due by mid-2018), a major financial scandal involving 1MDB, a stateowned strategic investment company, threatens to further undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the prime minister and president of UMNO, Najib Tun Razak. At the same time, civil society has become increasingly active – and agitated – as they engage the state on a raft of issues ranging from defence of the sacrosanct principle of Malay-Muslim dominance, implementation of Islamic strictures, freedom of worship for followers of minority religions, corruption and nepotism, indigenous rights of residents of East Malaysia as encapsulated in the ‘20 point’ and ‘18 point’ agreement documents signed between the state governments of Sabah and Sarawak and the Malaysian federal government, the gathering pace of environmental degradation, and the list goes on. While many of these issues are hardly new, the way they have unfolded in the post-Mahathir era has hastened academic and public discourse concerning them. More importantly, these issues have given rise to new research agendas in Malaysian studies. Indeed, the breadth of this new research agenda is reflected in the work of a new generation of scholars and ‘Malaysianists’, and finds expression in recent published scholarship covering the nexus between Islamic finance and politics, Islamist pop culture, the reframing of identity and nationalism among East Malaysians, environmental politics, the increasing prominence of ulama in everyday politics, and (un)civil activism.