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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Echoing the call recently made by Ed and Dana Luck and building on a research project triggered several years ago by Siba Grovogui’s postcolonial critique of the concept of responsibility to protect (R2P), this article explores the significance of what may be labeled individual R2P. It argues that acknowledging individual R2P as part of the doctrine not only highlights the role that a heretofore underappreciated layer of actors can and does play to protect individuals from some of the worst crimes. At the theoretical level, it also has the potential to mitigate some of the R2P doctrine’s main ambiguities, while in real life, acknowledging individual R2P does, without exonerating institutional actors from their obvious responsibilities, recognize at the very least the right of people of conscience, worldwide, to take matters in their own hands even in the worst cases of international paralysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A powerful new wave of alienating land from those who live on it is sweeping the global commons, and discourses such as “Emerging Economies” and “Brazil, Russia, India, China” are the ideological mediators of this wave. In India, the “slow violence” of the Nehruvian decades has been replaced by the accelerated pace of such processes under a neoliberal dispensation. In both periods, the overwhelming costs of “development” have been preponderantly visited upon Dalits, tribals, and landless laborers. Colonial laws regarding land acquisition and Eminent Domain have been an important legacy for the postcolonial state in its efforts to acquire land for private capital. They have intersected with notions of race and caste within the habitus of the Indian middle class, whose efforts to make the nation are simultaneously the unmaking of various subaltern groups and classes. Yet, as the struggle between the multinational Vedanta Corporation and a tribal group called the Dongaria Kondh in the Niyamgiri Hills of Odisha in southeastern India demonstrates, the outcomes are by no means a foregone conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]