Moving Global IR Forward - A Roadmap

Many disciplinary analyses have exposed 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. With reference to Latin American examples, this paper 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 paper identifies three main strategies for discovering and developing theories outside the core. Third, it offers three different avenues for applying local theories to the larger global canvas, underlining that theories ‘from’ the Global South should not necessarily be limited to their ‘own’ regions.