Mohammed Ayoob’s book is an important recollection of his scholarly journey across several decades of studying the security predicament(s) of Global South countries (during the Cold War that neglected but paramount part of the world, which includes most of humankind, was then called the “Third World”). The book includes an introductory chapter written by Yong-Soo Eun and Amitav Acharya incorporating Ayoob’s perspective as part of today’s “Global IR,” followed by thirteen essays/articles/papers published by Ayoob between 1989 and 2020, and a final chapter completed by Ayoob for this compilation, summarizing his journey “from regional security to subaltern Realism.”

Mohammed Ayoob has been a pioneering scholar in International Relations in discerning the relevance of the Global South for understanding international and regional security. He has rejected the ethno-centric views of IR theories (both neo-Realism and neo-Liberalism), which “do not fit” easily the “intermestic” complex realities of the “developing countries” in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. His essays remain very relevant today, to make sense of the civil wars in Sudan and elsewhere; post-colonial state conflicts in the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia; and the anomie of many Southern countries (for instance, in the Arab Middle East). Ayoob offers a critical perspective, though not a post-modern one, of Western-centrism, and its limitations in applying Western theories of IR (such as the IR “security dilemma”) to make sense of the “insecurity dilemma” (mostly domestic) that prevails in the Global South. Moreover, Ayoob depicts himself as a follower of Hedley Bull’s English School approach in emphasizing the importance of international norms in the process of state-making in the post-colonial world (p. 255). Normative tensions between “order” and “justice” as delineated by Bull for the international society as a whole, are adopted and adapted to make sense of the clashing realities of the Global North versus the Global South.

Mohammed Ayoob’s scholarship has been recognized among students of IR for several decades, especially for the development of the theory (or in his more modest depiction, “perspective”) of Subaltern Realism. The “Third World security predicament” is encapsulated in this concept that accepts the essential premises of Realism (statism, security, and survival), while emphasizing the specific security concerns of many of the countries of the Global South, which happen to be both “subaltern” (i.e., dependent, or ancillary to the distribution of power in the system), and essentially domestic. In his own words, “the major security preoccupations are primarily internal in character and are a function of the early stages of state making at which they find themselves” (p. 89). That explains why, in Ayoob’s scholarship, we might find interesting parallels between the contemporary security predicaments of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries and the historical experience of European state-making in previous centuries.

In terms of international security, the relevance of the “insecurity dilemma” for state-making and state-building remains crucial, since that helps us to explain why the vast majority of armed conflicts in the international system since the end of World War II happen to take place within and among “subaltern states” (p. 216). Moreover, the contrast between the two major normative principles of the international society (order vs. justice) acquires a striking connotation when we compare the preferences of the “hegemonic perspective” (the Global North) in juxtaposition to the “Global South” (subaltern). One of the major insights of Ayoob’s work is sketched in the following two sentences: “A major tension between the hegemonic and subaltern perspectives of international order can be summarized in the following words: While the former emphasizes order among states and justice within them, the latter stresses order within states and justice among them” (p. 216). The corollary of that preference is what Ayoob refers to as a kind of “acute schizophrenia” in the approach of the Global South countries toward the international order. On the one hand, they want to be considered an integral part of the expanding international society and not just “intruders” or late-comers. On the other hand, they want to transcend the embedded inequalities in the system and bring about normative and practical changes in issue areas such as humanitarian intervention and nuclear proliferation.

The scholarly path initially trailed by Ayoob in making sense of the “Third World” has been followed by other scholars who questioned the validity of Western theoretical premises of IR to make sense of the Global South. This includes scholars like Kalevi Holsti (1996) The State, War, and the State of War; Robert Jackson (1990) Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World, and the late Argentine scholar Carlos Escudé (1997), Foreign Policy Theory in Menem’s Argentina, who developed an intriguing and overlapping concept of “peripheral Realism” to make sense of the limited leverage that countries like Argentina could have in the “big game” of the great powers as “norm takers.” Interestingly enough, perhaps because of his overall focus on security concerns, Ayoob does not refer explicitly to the vast literature in international political economy regarding the dependency of the subaltern states upon the hegemonic system (of authors such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1979), Dependency and Development in Latin America).

Since Ayoob is ultimately concerned with issues of international order and regional security, we learn several important insights as we read his essays. First, the idea of “collective security” has not been translated into an explicit practice, perhaps with the exception of the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. Second, and contrary to the initial expectations in the 1990s that after the Cold War, the Global South would become marginal and irrelevant, it has become more and more relevant for the emerging competition between the United States and China (which is not part of the non-aligned world). Third, regional systems can turn themselves into regional societies (following Bull’s categorization of “system” vs. “society”) but that is not always or necessarily the case. Fourth, “humanitarian intervention” can be criticized as a new form of “organized hypocrisy” on the part of the hegemonic West in imposing its normative premises upon the Global South. Fifth, inequality is a feature not just of the international system but also of IR as a scientific discipline. Sixth, we can understand Political Islam as a form of an anti-hegemonic ideology. Seventh, the United Nations reflects the harsh realities of the distribution of power and the limitations that Global South countries face due to their “subaltern Realism.”

In his book, we get an excellent idea of the vast scope, criticism, and originality of Ayoob’s contribution to the study of IR. Two criticisms might be in place, which might point out my own biases and prejudices, and not just those of Mohammed Ayoob. First, his examples about the regional security predicaments of the Global South tend to focus almost exclusively upon the Middle East, South Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Southeast Asia. Africa and Latin America are not mentioned in his book, so the impression that we get is that of a Global South as a kind of generic but residual and stereotypical category. Second, as an Israeli peace scholar, I agree with his analysis and criticism regarding “Israel’s continued occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands in violation of a large number of Security Council resolutions” (as for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, p. 224). At the same time, I disagree with Ayoob’s depiction of the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of settler colonialism. I believe that this is not a typical post-colonial conflict, but rather the tragic struggle between two indigenous people claiming legitimate rights to the same piece of land. At the same time, the fact that his essays written 30 or 40 years ago remain pertinent to make sense of current events in IR demonstrates the lingering relevance of Ayoob’s scholarship nowadays.