Realism in the Global South: A new perspective of the tools Realists have to analyze developing countries' foreign policy

For a long time Realism has been seen as a Eurocentric theory, focused on and only viable in explaining the behaviors of super and great powers. Since the end of the Cold War, Realism has been losing its dominance in the field of International Relations to new theories which are said to be more appropriate to describe the 21st century dynamics. These theories include Constructivism, Liberalism, and the English School, among others. Mainstream literature on the debate over whether Realists are still able to analyze and predict the multipolar world, where the considerations of medium and small powers' foreign policy matter, ends with a negative conclusion. Many authors, like the Argentinian political scientist Carlos Escude, argue that a new branch of the classical theory must be constructed to clarify the behavior of Third World countries; they call it "Peripheral Realism". This theory gives a Latin American perspective of a hierarchy where peripheral countries are not rule-makers, and for that reason the principles of Realism could not be applied to them. In this paper I disagree with the last statement and argue that developing countries are still affected by the anarchical system; in a lesser scale, they are power maximizers; and in a pragmatic way they act under the principle of Self-Help; all points made by Realists. I also argue that a second way to apply Realism, more specifically Kenneth Waltz's Structural Realism, to the Global South is considering regionalism as a micro-universe, in which states will still try to maximize their power in order to compete with their neighbors for the region's leadership and for reasons of survival.