Challenges and Limitations of Developing International Relations Theory from the Global South

International Relations Theory (IRT) has long carried a Western passport. Its founding ideas about sovereignty, anarchy, balance of power, and diplomacy were built from European and North American historical experience, then presented as universal laws of how states behave. As power shifts toward new economic players in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, scholars increasingly ask whether the Global South can produce its own theory, one that speaks from its own history rather than borrowing a Western script. The answer is complicated. Building a distinct, non-Western IRT is not simply a matter of will or talent. It runs into deep structural, historical, and intellectual obstacles that make the project far harder than it first appears.

What “developing IRT from the Global South” actually means 🔗

The Global South is not a fixed geography. It is better understood as a political idea that emerged when former colonies came together around shared experiences of imperialism and decolonisation. As Siba Grovogui argues, the term is a symbolic designation with political implications, capturing a sense of cohesion that grew out of anti-colonial movements, the 1955 Bandung Conference, and the Non-Aligned Movement. It refers less to a bloc of nation-states and more to a set of shared practices, attitudes, and relations.

This matters for theory-building. If the Global South is held together by political solidarity rather than a single shared culture, language, or institutional structure, then any theory claiming to represent it must somehow speak for an enormously diverse set of histories. That tension sits at the heart of every limitation discussed below.

The problem of a missing centralised structure 🔗

Western IRT developed inside a dense ecosystem of well-funded universities, established journals, professional associations, and research traditions that reinforced one another over decades. The Global South largely lacks this kind of centralised intellectual infrastructure dedicated to theory.

Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, in their influential work on why there is no non-Western IR theory, identify several practical barriers. These include a scarcity of resources, a shortage of publishing outlets, language barriers, official discomfort with theoretical work, and the strong pull of policy-relevant research that offers greater prestige and financial reward. A scholar in a developing country often faces pressure to produce immediately useful policy analysis rather than abstract theory. Theory is a long, slow, and often unrewarded investment.

Without a network of institutions consistently supporting theoretical work, ideas remain scattered. Brilliant individual contributions appear, but they struggle to accumulate into a coherent school of thought that can rival realism or liberalism.

Signs of slow change 🔗

The picture is not static. Acharya and Buzan note that some barriers have eased, with better-endowed universities in Asia and the growth of new institutions such as the South Asian University and privately funded universities in India. The emergence of Asia-focused journals and the longstanding work of older institutions have gradually expanded the resource base. The infrastructure is improving, but it remains far from the depth that supported Western theory for over a century.

The lack of historical coherence and a conjoined agenda 🔗

A second major limitation is the absence of a single shared history that can anchor one unified theory. The Global South includes societies with radically different colonial experiences, precolonial political traditions, religions, and economic trajectories. The history of an African state shaped by the slave trade and direct colonial rule differs sharply from that of a Latin American republic or a South Asian civilisation with its own ancient statecraft.

This diversity creates a coherence problem. A theory generalising from one regional experience risks misrepresenting the others. It also creates an agenda problem. Western IRT could organise itself around shared questions such as how to manage anarchy among great powers. The Global South’s concerns are more varied, ranging from underdevelopment and debt to sovereignty, identity, and resistance to domination. Holding these together under a single theoretical banner is genuinely difficult.

The authenticity question: are these theories truly indigenous? 🔗

Perhaps the deepest challenge is intellectual. Much theorising from the Global South works by adapting Western concepts to local contexts rather than building entirely new frameworks from the ground up. This raises a hard question: if a “non-Western” theory still relies on Western categories, vocabulary, and academic standards, how non-Western is it really?

Grovogui’s own position complicates the easy assumption that postcolonial scholarship simply equals anti-Western theory. In a wide-ranging interview, he expressed weariness with the idea that speaking about postcolonialism in Africa must mean being anti-Western, rejecting such rigid categories. For Grovogui, the goal is not to invent a mirror image of Western theory but to question its claims to universality.

There is also a structural reason authenticity is so hard to achieve. The academic institutions that produce and certify “legitimate” theory are still largely based in the West, often staffed by Western-trained scholars. This produces a paradox: Global South scholars frequently critique Eurocentrism while writing from within Western academic structures and traditions. Their resistance is channelled through the very lens they are trying to escape. Even leading critics such as Acharya and Buzan articulate their challenge using the language and forms of mainstream IR.

From “non-Western IRT” to “Global IR” 🔗

This authenticity dilemma helps explain a shift in terminology. Acharya later moved away from “non-Western IRT” toward the idea of Global IR, partly to address concerns raised by scholars working on Global South issues. The reframing acknowledges a key point: the aim is not to build a rival theory walled off from the West, but to broaden IR so it recognises multiple sources of knowledge. Grovogui himself has noted that postcolonialism is not an attempt to foster a “non-Western IR” but rather to tackle broader questions about the universality of modern social-scientific categories.

The nation-state trap 🔗

Another complication is that Global South countries themselves adopted the Western model of the sovereign nation-state. Decolonisation did not produce new forms of political organisation so much as new states organised on European lines, with fixed borders, central governments, and claims to absolute sovereignty.

This creates a built-in difficulty for distinctive theory. If states across the South operate within an inherited Westphalian framework, much of their behaviour can be explained reasonably well by existing Western theories. Scholars such as Acharya have pointed out that imposing the Western concept of the nation-state on non-Western societies distorts their political realities, yet those same societies have largely embraced that model in practice. Theorising “from outside” the system is hard when you are firmly operating inside it.

South-South relations and the neo-colonialism debate 🔗

One reason a purely Global South theory is so contested is that the South is not free of its own internal power imbalances. China’s expanding developmental role in Africa is the clearest example, and it shows that domination is not only a North-South story.

China frames its engagement, particularly the Belt and Road Initiative, as South-South cooperation and “win-win” partnership, filling an infrastructure financing gap that Western lenders left open. Critics counter that the relationship can reproduce older patterns of dependency. Analysts examining the BRI through a neo-colonial lens argue it risks undermining African sovereignty and long-term development through unsustainable debt, opaque agreements, and the erosion of local industries, even while delivering short-term infrastructure gains.

The reality is more layered than either narrative suggests. Research foregrounding African agency shows that Chinese finance has turned development aid into a contested political arena in which African actors strategically leverage China’s rise to challenge Western-dominated aid regimes and reclaim policy space. Dependency and agency coexist. For IRT, this is significant: a theory that treats the Global South as a single victimised bloc cannot capture the hierarchies, rivalries, and bargaining that exist within the South itself.

Why the project still matters 🔗

Despite these limitations, the case for developing IRT from the Global South grows stronger as the international system changes. The rise of new economic powers, including India, China, Brazil, and the wider BRICS grouping, means that more than half the world’s population and a growing share of its economic weight now sit outside the traditional Western core.

A theory built almost entirely on Western experience cannot adequately explain a multipolar world. When development programmes, conflict interventions, and governance reforms are designed using frameworks centred on Western experience, they often fail because they ignore how non-Western societies actually function. Globalising IR means refusing to approach others as if they had no theory of their own, and recognising that key ideas have multiple authors across diverse traditions.

The deeper goal is normative as much as analytical. Grovogui describes the Global South as a movement underscoring the need for a postcolonial international community oriented toward equality and justice. Diversifying IRT is therefore not just about academic accuracy. It is about whether the rules and norms of global politics will continue to reflect the interests of a narrow set of powerful states, or whether they can be reimagined to give voice to the majority of the world.

Holding the contradictions together 🔗

The challenges are real and they pull in different directions. There is no centralised structure to sustain theory, no single history to anchor it, and a persistent authenticity problem because critique still flows through Western academic channels. The adoption of the nation-state model and the existence of new hierarchies within the South, exemplified by debates over China in Africa, further complicate any neat “South versus North” framing.

Yet these very tensions are productive. Recognising that the Global South is plural, that its theories are hybrid rather than purely indigenous, and that power operates within it as well as upon it, leads to a richer and more honest picture of world politics. The future of IRT probably lies not in replacing Western theory with a single Southern alternative, but in building a genuinely global discipline with many authors and many starting points.

What do you think? If a theory developed in the Global South still uses Western concepts and academic standards, can it ever be considered truly “indigenous,” or is intellectual hybridity simply unavoidable in a connected world? And as countries like India and China grow more powerful, do you think they will help dismantle Eurocentric IRT, or will they build their own dominant frameworks that marginalise smaller states in the South?

References

1. https://www.e-ir.info/2020/07/03/the-global-south-as-a-political-project/
2. https://academic.oup.com/irap/article/17/3/341/3933493
3. https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/168715/Theory%20Talk57_Grovogui.pdf
4. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/85924/1/Acharya_Buzan_Why%20is%20there%20no%20non-Western%20International.pdf
5. https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/2042473
6. https://zenodo.org/records/14043781
7. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2026.2653235
8. https://www.e-ir.info/2018/04/22/how-to-globalise-ir/