The importance of mathematics and mathematics education in current societies is associated with them being seen as “powerful”. The meaning of power is, however, not always explicitly expressed or easy to define in a clearcut way. In this chapter we trace three different perspectives of thinking about power in relation to mathematics education, as they are expressed in the network of mathematics education practices. The intrinsic perspective, the technical perspective and the structural inequality perspective represent three different ways of seeing what power is and how it is distributed. Highlighting these perspectives helps us investigate the constraints and potentials of different ways of conceiving mathematics education and construct new imaginaries for the future. Educating people in mathematics is considered a powerful enterprise. ‘Mathematics is at the core of Western culture’. ‘Mathematics is a powerful tool to reinforce and secure access to the material, economic and the social world’. Statements of this nature frequently appear in discussions on the role of mathematics in the construction and consolidation of a modern, industrialized and democratic society. Even though modern societies have entered into a post-industrial era, such statements are still at the core of justification for allocating funds for mathematics education and for improving the teaching of mathematics at all educational levels. Where mathematics used to be a tool for building infrastructure and developing industry, it has gradually become a tool for building the informational infrastructure and advanced communication technologies. In this sense mathematics is continuously perceived as a prerequisite for progress and wealth. Thinking in terms of mathematics as powerful immediately grants power to mathematics education as a privileged social practice through which children and adults alike will come to know about mathematics. But what is the meaning of the term power when connected with mathematics and mathematics education? How and by whom is this power exercised? What are the consequences of power for participants in the practices of mathematics education? On the following pages we will address these questions with a view to demonstrate that it is not a straightforward issue to talk about power in relation to mathematics education. Instead we argue that power is complexly distributed across the entire network of mathematics education practices. By this term we refer to the network of language games that, intertwined by family resemblances, constitute mathematics education; from social interaction at a micro level, such as classroom interactions, to practices at macro levels of society at large, such as political decision making, labour market needs and even mathematics education research. In this chapter, we focus on three perspectives on power found in the network of mathematics education practices and often addressed in mathematics education research: an intrinsic perspective, a technical perspective, and a structural inequality 1 The notion of network of mathematics education practices has been discussed in Valero (2002, 2007)