This edited volume critically examines and reviews the major conceptual and historical changes that occurred in the wake of the end of the Cold War in the social sciences. The authors address and situate these changes between the epistemic level of paradigms and theories on the one hand, and empirical and historical processes in specific domains of social life that are recorded through particular ethnographic and empirical operations on the other. Anthropologists, sociologists, political theorists, and geographers explore how epistemic change occurred in certain fields (sociology of religion, human rights law, political theory, financial economy etc.), critically interrogate how these changes prefigured scholarly perceptions and confront these with ethnographic observations in specific empirical contexts.