As BRICS expands its membership and Western-led institutions face renewed uncertainty, an increasingly familiar question has resurfaced across policy circles, think tanks, and academic debates: who should lead the Global South? The question has gained urgency as the liberal international order enters one of its deepest crises in decades. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has intensified pressures on multilateral institutions already weakened by years of geopolitical fragmentation. From the paralysis of global climate negotiations to renewed trade unilateralism and declining confidence in Western-led institutions, analysts increasingly warn that the post-Cold War governance model is eroding. If traditional Western powers are retreating from the institutions they once built, who will step in?

Yet this conversation rests on a flawed assumption: that the Global South must eventually produce a leader that resembles the historical trajectory of leadership in the Global North. This assumption is deeply embedded in mainstream International Relations theory. Frameworks such as hegemonic stability theory and power transition theory — associated with Kindleberger, Gilpin, and Organski — share a common premise: stable international order requires concentrated power. Leadership is understood as hierarchical, centralized, and materially concentrated in one or a few dominant actors capable of providing public goods, enforcing norms, and shaping institutional architecture. Historically, this framework emerged from specific Northern experiences: British imperial dominance in the nineteenth century and American post-war hegemony in the twentieth.

The problem is that these historically contingent experiences were gradually transformed into universal models. As scholars such as Amitav Acharya, Arlene Tickner and David Blaney have argued, mainstream IR has frequently universalized Western historical trajectories while marginalizing alternative forms of political organization. The question of who should lead the Global South reproduces this bias — and its effects are visible in real time. Every time........

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