The aim of this article is to analyse the ontological and epistemological dimensions of the main stages of the development of regional studies as a sub-discipline of international relations. The research problem of the article focuses on the interdependence and significance of regional studies as a sub-discipline within the scholarly discipline of international relations. The issue of regionalism and the region arose in the period of the establishment of international relations as a scholarly discipline during the interwar years, and was further conceptualized in the 1950s and 1960s during the Cold War period. The status of regional studies was then marginalized in methodological, ontological and epistemological discourse by the main theoretical trends of international relations. As a result, it was only after the end of the Cold War that we witnessed a gradual, systemic process of reintegration of regional studies within the discipline. This article argues that the reintegration of regional studies into the discipline of international relations is a function of two parallel processes that are interrelated: the transformation of the liberal international order after the end of the Cold War and increased pluralism in scholarly discourse within the discipline of international relations. These developments and their associated academic implications have contributed to the consolidation and strengthening of regional studies as a major subdiscipline of international relations.

India’s role in the post-Cold War liberal international order (LIO) has primarily been examined in terms of whether it can become a revisionist or status quo power, both politically and economically. However, the concept of India as a ‘Vishwaguru’ (world teacher), promoted by the BJP government of Narendra Modi since 2014, projects India as a source of norms and principles that can govern international relations. This raises the question of how this new proposal might affect the LIO? Using a ‘normative power’ concept, this chapter seeks to understand the ‘Vishwaguru’ as an alternative proposition of ordering international system. It looks at critical government and ruling party documents, speeches by BJP leaders and supporters, and existing literature to better understand the rationale and goals of this new approach. It finds that India is thereby undermining Western dominance of the global discourse on the international system and poses a normative challenge to the political and economic LIO. While India’s approach reveals its ambitions for global power, it also contains essential flaws and contradictions that will limit the effectiveness of this strategy.

Brazil’s position towards the War in Ukraine sheds light on fundamental ambiguities of Brazil’s contemporary self-representations. While Brazil has traditionally defined itself in relation to its identification with the West, it has simultaneously recognized and often claimed its significant place in the “Global South”, either as a Latin American country or as part of coalitions balancing against a western-centric order, such as BRICS. These multiple self-representations have favoured foreign policy analyses that emphasize the country´s ambiguous stance in the international order. This article proposes to take Brazil´s non-alignment as an analytical prism to reflect on the in-between spaces and categories that emerge from polarizing narratives of the liberal international order. By adopting the theoretical lens of liminality in International Relations (Rumelili, 2012), the article shows how the narrative on the “new Cold War” in the context of the war in Ukraine (re)produces liminal spaces as different actors, such as Brazil, are unsuccessfully forced into established social categories, which in turn exposes the very instability of polarities in international politics, such as West and East or North and South, and of the liberal world order itself.

Brazil has come in for a lot of criticism for some of the positions it has taken in response to what has been called a period of ‘permanent crisis’ in world politics. European leaders in particular have shown themselves to be perplexed about what they consider to be contradictory positions in response to two crises in particular: the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the Israeli war in Gaza in response to the Hamas terrorist attacks on 7 October 2023. Yet, the Brazilian response to these crises should not have come as a surprise. Using the conceptual frameworks of Complexity and Human Systems Dynamics, as well as complexity mapping as an illustrative model, this paper argues that the Brazilian positions to these crises are both predictable and internally coherent. What is lacking is mutual knowledge and understanding of these positions. Increasing such understanding is critical as a way of working together more effectively stopping the waste of political capital on issues over which outsiders have little to no influence.