The social world has fundamentally changed since 1989. There was an expectation of an "end of history" and the global spread of Western institutions. Instead, the multilateral world of the past has returned, in which societies from the Global South also play a role. Using concrete regional and country examples from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this volume questions the usefulness of our theoretical vocabulary, seeks appropriate categories for describing long-term and fundamental social transformation processes, and thus also examines the possibly limited temporal and spatial reach of dominant globalization discourses.