Akira, Vol. 3 by Yoko Umezawa and Linda M. York and Jo Duffy and Katsuhiro Otomo

"Tetsuo, an unstable youth with immense paranormal abilities of his own, has done the unthinkable: he has released Akira and set into motion a chain of events that could once again destroy the city and drag the world to the brink of Armageddon. Resistance agents and an armanda of government forces race against the clock to find the child with godlike powers before his unstoppable destructive abilities are unleashed!"--P. [4] of cover.

After the events of the first 2 volumes, we continue following Kaneda and the rest of the characters trying to understand and react to everything that's happening.

This volume focus a lot more of its time in the political and military aspect of the story, which raises interesting topics and give a lot more depth to the aspects we were introduce before.
We see more talks about the political landscape, what are the moves of the military and the motivations for characters like Mr. Nezu and Colonel Shikishima. This help to enhance and give more meaning to all of what's happening and its themes.
At the same time, the mystery grows in complexity and involves aspects as religion and war, another thing that helps give more depth to the series.
But continues with problems of characterization on Kaneda and the others, feeling more like just charismatic and comedic entities and less than complex characters with different motivations. At this point, I feel the manga doesn't want to give them alot more depht and just focus itself on the themes and mistery of the story. This can alianate some readers but gain anothers, so it's really a matter of preferences.

To conclude, I think this is the best volume yet and the one that raises the stakes of the story a lot more, given more complexity to its themes and the one that start separate Akira from other works.