The Evolution and Contributions of International Relations Theory from the Global South

For most of its existence as an academic discipline, International Relations has spoken with a noticeably Western accent. Concepts like the balance of power, sovereignty, and anarchy were drawn largely from European and American history and then presented as universal truths. But the experiences of the colonised, the decolonising, and the developing world tell a different story. International Relations Theory (IRT) from the Global South is the attempt to recover those voices, traditions, and frameworks that mainstream theory long ignored. This is not simply about adding new names to old reading lists. It is about questioning who gets to define the rules of the game and whose history counts as world history.

Why the Global South matters in IR theory 🔗

The starting point for this conversation is a sharp observation by scholars Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan. They argued that almost all International Relations theory is produced by and for the West, resting on the assumption that Western history is effectively world history. Their landmark 2010 volume, Non-Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives On and Beyond Asia, posed a deceptively simple question: why is there no non-Western IR theory? Their answer was not that the Global South lacked ideas about war, peace, and order. It was that these ideas were rarely recognised, taught, or treated as “theory” in the same way Western frameworks were.

This matters because theory shapes how we see the world. If realism is built mostly from European inter-state wars, and liberalism from Anglo-American institutional design, then large parts of the planet are studied only as case studies that confirm or deviate from a Western norm. Acharya and Buzan’s project, later expanded into the idea of Global IR, was to challenge this imbalance and open up a genuinely cross-cultural conversation about how international order is imagined.

A framework for understanding Southern contributions 🔗

One of the most useful things Acharya and Buzan did was offer a way to organise the scattered intellectual contributions of the Global South. Rather than treating non-Western thought as a single block, they identified several distinct sources. Understanding these categories helps make sense of why some contributions look like “theory” and others look like statecraft or political doctrine.

Classical traditions of statecraft 🔗

The first source is the body of classical or pre-modern thought about power and order. These are ancient texts and traditions that long predate the modern discipline but contain sophisticated reasoning about how rulers and states should behave. They were not written as “IR theory,” yet they grapple with the same problems: security, alliances, deterrence, and survival.

The thought of non-Western leaders 🔗

The second source is the political thought of leaders who governed newly independent or revolutionary states. Figures like Jawaharlal Nehru and Mao Zedong did not write academic treatises, but they articulated distinctive doctrines that shaped how their nations and the wider Global South engaged with the world.

Adaptations of Western theories 🔗

The third source is the way scholars in the Global South have borrowed and reworked Western theories to fit local realities. A great deal of IR teaching in countries like India still uses realism, liberalism, and constructivism, but applies them to regional problems. This adaptation is significant, though it also reveals a dependence on Western categories.

Studies of regional and local contexts 🔗

The fourth source is detailed empirical work on specific regions and their unique dynamics, from Southeast Asian regionalism to South Asian security. This is where much original Southern scholarship actually happens, even if it rarely gets labelled as grand theory.

Classical thinkers: Kautilya and the Arthashastra 🔗

No discussion of Indian contributions to strategic thought is complete without Kautilya, also known as Chanakya, the advisor to Chandragupta Maurya. His treatise, the Arthashastra, written in the fourth century BCE, is one of the oldest systematic works on statecraft and political realism anywhere in the world. It was composed centuries before Western thinkers like Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Thucydides became the standard reference points for realist thought.

Kautilya’s most famous contribution to thinking about inter-state relations is the Mandala theory. The word mandala literally means “circle,” and the theory imagines a king surrounded by concentric circles of neighbouring states. The core assumption is striking: an immediate neighbour is a natural rival, while the state beyond that neighbour is a natural ally. In other words, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This logic of shifting alliances, balance of power, and calculated diplomacy maps remarkably well onto modern realist ideas about how states pursue security and national interest.

What makes Kautilya distinct is the emphasis. His realism stressed the militaristic dimension of security and the practical tools of diplomacy, war, and territorial consolidation. This focus arguably makes his framework especially relevant to the post-independence experience of Global South states, many of which prioritised hard security in their early years. The Arthashastra shows that sophisticated theorising about international order is not a Western monopoly, even if it took the discipline a long time to acknowledge it.

Leaders as theorists: Nehru and Mao 🔗

The second category of contributions comes from political leaders who responded to the pressures of the Cold War with original ideas about how weaker, newly independent states should position themselves.

Nehru and non-alignment 🔗

Jawaharlal Nehru gave the Global South one of its most influential strategic concepts: non-alignment. He coined the phrase in a speech at Colombo in 1954 to describe a foreign policy that refused to join either the American or the Soviet military bloc. It is important to understand what non-alignment was not. It was not neutrality, isolationism, or passive non-involvement. Instead, it was an active, dynamic approach that judged each global issue on its own merits while protecting a young nation’s autonomy.

Closely linked to this was Panchsheel, the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, articulated in the 1954 agreement between India and China. These principles included mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. Panchsheel was endorsed at the 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and African nations and became the principled core of the Non-Aligned Movement, formally launched at Belgrade in 1961 alongside leaders like Tito of Yugoslavia and Nasser of Egypt.

Non-alignment was a genuinely Southern contribution to thinking about world order. It offered ex-colonies a collective bargaining platform in the United Nations and gave them a way to engage the superpowers without becoming clients of either. Of course, it had limits. The 1962 war with China exposed the fragility of moral agreements that lacked enforcement, and critics argue Nehru’s faith in Panchsheel bred a degree of strategic complacency.

Mao Zedong and the Three Worlds Theory 🔗

From China came another influential framework. Mao Zedong articulated the Three Worlds Theory in the 1970s, building on his earlier idea of “intermediate zones.” In February 1974, Mao set out a vision in which the United States and the Soviet Union together formed the first world of superpowers. The middle powers of Europe, Japan, and Canada formed the second world. The vast majority of developing countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America formed the third world.

What is important here is how different Mao’s scheme was from the Western “Third World” label. In the common Western usage, China and India sat in separate tiers of development. In Mao’s framework, both belonged to the third world of exploited nations, which he saw as the most reliable force for resisting superpower hegemony. The theory took national sovereignty as its starting point and opposition to hegemony as its strategy, framing the developing world not as a passive victim but as an agent of change in global politics.

Borrowed tools and indigenous resistance 🔗

The story so far might suggest a thriving, self-confident Southern tradition. The reality is more complicated, and this is where Acharya and Buzan’s analysis becomes genuinely critical rather than celebratory.

The persistence of Western dominance 🔗

Much of the IR theorising that happens in the Global South still operates within Western frameworks. Universities across India and the wider South largely teach realism, liberalism, and constructivism as the foundational lenses. Scholars are trained in Western institutions, publish in Western journals, and often measure their work against Western benchmarks. The result is that even when Southern scholars study their own regions, they frequently do so using imported categories. This is the third source in the Acharya-Buzan framework, the adaptation of Western theory, and it reveals a deep structural dependence.

This produces what some describe as a centre-periphery structure of knowledge. The ideas, rules, and standards of the core are privileged over those of the periphery, with membership of the core open mainly to those who successfully modernise and Westernise. Knowledge production, in short, mirrors the inequalities of the global economy.

Subaltern studies and postcolonial critique 🔗

The most determined attempt to resist this dominance comes from postcolonial and subaltern studies. Emerging in the 1980s through scholars like Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the subaltern, this approach set out to rewrite history from the perspective of the oppressed and the silenced. Spivak’s famous question, “Can the subaltern speak?”, asked whether marginalised groups can ever truly represent themselves when the very terms of global discourse are set by dominant powers.

Applied to IR, subaltern and postcolonial perspectives shift attention away from the state-centric debates of mainstream theory toward the hierarchical, racialised, and colonial structures that shape world politics. Edward Said’s analysis of how Western scholarship constructed distorted images of the “East” showed that knowledge itself can be a form of power. Kwame Nkrumah’s concept of neo-colonialism captured how economic control through institutions like the IMF and World Bank can replace direct political rule while preserving the old hierarchies.

Yet there is a paradox at the heart of this resistance. Subaltern studies, for all its radical intent, often remains framed within Western academic paradigms. It draws on European thinkers like Gramsci, publishes through Western universities, and works in the language and conventions of the Western academy. The critique of Eurocentrism is, in part, conducted on Eurocentric terms. This is precisely why Acharya eventually preferred the phrase “Global IR” over “non-Western IR,” hoping to move beyond a framing that simply defines the South in opposition to the West.

The case for genuinely independent perspectives 🔗

The deeper challenge, then, is not just to add Southern voices to the existing discipline but to develop frameworks that grow from Southern experiences on their own terms. A truly balanced global understanding of international relations requires more than tolerance of difference. It requires treating the strategic wisdom of the Arthashastra, the diplomatic innovation of non-alignment, and the lived realities of postcolonial states as legitimate sources of theory in their own right.

Recent global shifts make this more urgent. The rise of China, the growing influence of the BRICS grouping, and the increasingly assertive role of the Global South in international institutions all suggest that a discipline built solely on Western history will struggle to explain the world as it actually is. The intellectual project that Acharya and Buzan began is therefore unfinished. The contributions of the Global South are real and substantial, but the structures that marginalise them have proven remarkably durable.

What do you think? If so much of the world’s IR scholarship still relies on Western theories and Western institutions, can the Global South ever build a genuinely independent tradition of international thought, or is some degree of borrowing unavoidable? And which classical or modern Southern idea do you think deserves to be treated as serious “theory” rather than mere statecraft?

References

1. https://www.routledge.com/Non-Western-International-Relations-Theory-Perspectives-On-and-Beyond-Asia/Acharya-Buzan/p/book/9780415474740
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02529203.2013.760715
3. https://www.gktoday.in/mandala-theory-of-politics/
4. https://edukemy.com/blog/panchsheel-and-non-alignment-upsc-post-independence-notes/
5. https://www.legacyias.com/nehruvian-foreign-policy/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Worlds_Theory
7. https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9252/5/4/54