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International leadership failure by states is an underdeveloped concept in International Relations. Existing approaches commonly equate leadership with hegemony, arguing that leadership success and failure are contingent on primacy or shared material interests among states. In this article, we introduce a role theoretical approach, which defines international leadership as a social role that emerges from shared expectations among states pertaining to leadership purpose, group cohesion and time horizon. Accordingly, leadership failure occurs when role expectations between states diverge and states are unable to generate commensurate role-taking via alter-casting. Four leader-follower constellations can be distinguished: leadership enactment, denial, rejection and vacuum. The paper utilizes this theoretical heuristic to understand two cases of leadership failure. The first case involves Brazil's attempted leadership role in response to the Latin American migration crisis following the political crisis in Venezuela. The second case examines Indonesia's attempted leadership role in the South China Sea dispute. The empirical findings contribute to existing work on hegemony and leadership in international relations theory by showing that leadership failure comes in different variants and these variants are contingent on shared role expectations and alter-casting capacity of states involved.