Many disciplinary analyses have exposed international realtions (IR) as a Western-centric discipline, unaware of or unconcerned with its own ethnocentric outlook. A growing consensus in the global IR framework argues that it is time to move beyond disciplinary critique, but scholars disagree on how to proceed. Three key issues are still being debated: who can speak, how to go local, and how to make the local global. This article confronts these questions by offering three interlinked contributions. First, it develops a typology of scholarly profiles by combining the typically isolated debates on scholarly origin, embeddedness within local context, and location. Second, the article identifies three main strategies for discovering and developing theories outside the core. Third, it offers four different avenues for applying local theories to the larger global canvas, underlining that Global South theories should not necessarily be limited to their “own” regions. Together these three contributions constitute a comprehensive roadmap for how to advance global IR's research agenda. The article provides examples focused on Latin America, highlighting the benefits of the roadmap while also giving agency to regional theoretical debates that are often overlooked in the Global IR debate.

In the globalizing international relations (IR) debate, the “West” and “Global South” have conventionally been presented as fundamentally different categories. This has disguised any interconnectedness between the two categories and variation within them. What does this mean for the quest for “Global South theorizing?” In order to address this binary logic in the globalizing IR literature, I analyze the case of human security as an example of Global South theorizing. First, I disentangle the Western/Global South origins and inflection of the human security concept and find that there is Global South agency related to its conceptual development, but also Western inflections. Second, I examine and compare the apparent rejection of the concept in two regions of the Global South—Southeast Asia and Latin America—and find both similarities and differences in their disinterest in engaging with the concept. Curiously, the similarities lie in the positionality of these regions and their difference to the West. In this way, the article points to the danger of using these categories in a manner that reemphasizes binary logics and their constitutive effects, and it exposes the complexity regarding what we consider Global South and Global South theorizing.