Over the past 30 years, the mathematics education research community has incorporated more socio-cultural perspectives into its ways of understanding and examining teaching and learning. An expanding global community require an inclusive discipline, where issues such as social justice and equity are addressed. This knowledge review aims to present a critical discourse analysis of the socio-cultural hegemony from a socio-political point of view, and seek to answer the issue of how the socio-political perspective problematises and develops socio-cultural theory as a hegemony in the mathematical classroom. The method of collecting data relevant for our work involved varied data banks, secondary sources, manual searches and consultation with researchers within the field of mathematics education. The basis of our work is based upon articles, conferences and literature relevant to our field of research. The results presented in this paper are arranged to provide concise knowledge of the origin of the socio-cultural theory and the societal factors that contributed to the social turn in mathematics education. Further a chapter of the socio-political perspective emergence will be presented that highlights the dialectically interconnected orientations: identity, power, out-of-school mathematics, in/exclusion and communities of practice. By acknowledging the importance of including social and political factors in mathematics education, a deeper understanding for the construction of knowledge will be attained. An explicit focus on issues of identity and power is required if the mathematical community of practice intends to alter the arrangements in school that contribute to the production of inequities in the lived experiences of learners and educators.