India closed its 2026 chairship last weekend, when it hosted the 18th BRICS Leaders’ Summit at Bharat Mandapam under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”. [1]
The Chinese President Xi Jinping traveled to India, even though for less than 24 hours, signaling some willingness to rebuild ties with India’s Modi, as they meet for the first time since 2019 and after the countries fought deadly border clashes in 2020. The Presidents of Russia, Iran, South Africa, and Indonesia are also some of the key leaders who took part in the Summit.
The grouping now comprises eleven members and ten partners. [2] Such enlargement has produced a group that convenes close to half the world’s population and, on purchasing-power terms, roughly 40 % of global output, a figure overwhelmingly concentrated in one member, and much smaller at market exchange rates. [3]
This Summit’s agenda focused on strengthening cooperation among member countries while promoting practical outcomes in areas such as economic development, technology, sustainability and global governance. What the summit produced, and, perhaps more importantly, what it did not, illustrates a difficulty that has plagued the group since its creation and that indeed accentuated with its expansion in recent years: the strategies that make membership attractive to each state individually are the same ones that prevent the group from acting collectively.
The BRICS: What for?
Born out of a desire to critique and transform the Western-dominated liberal international order, its members typically convene to discuss issues such as establishing a monetary union to counter the predominance of the dollar, creating a single market, and representing the interests and concerns of developing countries which, they claim, are underrepresented in international institutions.
The latest Summit concluded with the New Delhi Declaration, a 140 paragraph-long consensus political statement which establishes common positions on multilateral reform, development finance, trade, security and strategic supply chains.[4] However, there are several obstacles to turning these very broad political commitments into operational cooperation. Procedurally, the declaration is not a legally binding treaty; it merely records common positions and outlines areas for potential cooperation among the members. While the group has arguably served as a convening platform for its members to cooperate on critical areas such as education, trade, climate change, and food security, there remain broader obstacles to the success of the BRICS as a political arena for contestation of the governance status quo.
The BRICS' struggles
The group’s financial institutions - the New Development Bank (NDB) and Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) - were designed as alternatives to the Bretton Woods arrangements, which are the monetary and financial agreements established at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 aimed at creating a new international monetary system after World War II. However the BRICS alternatives have fallen short on their promises. The former provides loans, guarantees, and other financial mechanisms in support of private projects with a focus on sustainable development and infrastructure-building. However, it is much smaller than institutions such as the World Bank and it is unlikely that it will ever replace it. [5] Furthermore, some argue that it is essentially replicating many of the practices of the very competitors it was supposed to replace.
Then there is the issue of trying to de-dollarize international trade, chiefly through increased use of their own currencies, particularly the Chinese renminbi.[6] This is easier said than done, as this goal would require compromises that its members seem unwilling to strike, such as forming a banking union and achieve some convergence on macroeconomic policies.
The group is also increasingly diverse, especially since the latest expansion, and now includes a variety of strange bedfellows who often pursue very different strategic objectives. This growing diversity of views will make it more difficult to accomplish stated common goals and take coordinate action.[7] In addition, there are significant, long-standing tensions between China and India, as well as between Ethiopia and Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Although the BRICS are in principle committed to "multilateralism and upholding the international law, including the Purposes and Principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations (UN)”, since the war between the United States and Israel on the one hand, and Iran on the other, the group has not had a collective position as several of the members sit on both sides of the conflict and several depend on the U.S. for their own defence. [8] Even more notably, though perhaps unsurprisingly, since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the group has avoided condemning Russia’s actions and have instead sought to increase their commercial relationships with the country. [9] China and India further compete for leadership of the Global South, and the group has struggled to make decisions and reach agreements. [10] Economic underperformance in China, and recessions, corruption, and crippled state capacity in Brazil and South Africa further threaten the supposed dynamism of the group.
Conclusion
The main limit of the BRICS' hedging strategies, namely the attempt to shape the terms of engagement with great powers while keeping alignment ambiguous and maximizing returns from both sides, is that hedging and collective capacity pull against each other. [11] Pooling agency requires members to accept constraints on their individual room for maneuver, a trade-off that is all too familiar to another grouping, namely ASEAN. Most members joined the BRICS in order to widen their room for maneuver rather than narrow it. But each accommodation agreed on bilaterally is therefore simultaneously rational for the state making it and corrosive of any collective position the group might have had.
This is also explains why the BRICS have no normative programme. Besides sharing grievances, such as under-representation in the UNSC, the IMF and the World Bank, and a shared desire for reform of the multilateral systems, they are less in agreement as to what a different world order might look like. Such multipolarity talk is therefore better understood as a resource in national foreign policies than as a description of structure: it is a convenient strategic narrative that lets secondary states justify non-alignment at home and decline to choose sides in the current great power competition.
So, to return to the question of purpose: the above shortcomings do not make the BRICS trivial, certainly not for its members and not for other secondary states that share similar grievances and a desire for better representation of the Global South in international affairs. The capacity to convene such different voices is in itself a capability, even though it does not transfer into material power, and it socializes officials into shared political narratives and discourses.
However, such capability rests on not being put to the test: already the wars in Ukraine and Iran and the failure to agree on a joint statement on UNSC reform are revealing the cracks on the surface. So, while the BRICS might very well be much ado about something real (namely the shared demand for greater Global South voice in international institutions), it is not evidence of a different distribution of power in the current world order.
[1] https://www.brics2026.gov.in/about-us/
[2] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/what-brics-group-and-why-it-expanding
[3] https://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/diplomacy/insights/brics-at-20/
[6] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/dedollarization-china-russia/
[7] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/brics-expansion/
[8] http://static.kremlin.ru/media/events/files/en/RosOySvLzGaJtmx2wYFv0lN4NSPZploG.pdf
[9] https://www.cartainternacional.abri.org.br/Carta/article/view/1286
