BRICS expanded from 5 to 10+ members in 2024, adding Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Ethiopia, and Egypt. It represents 45% of the world's population and 35% of global GDP. But does it represent a genuine alternative world order, or is it a collection of countries united mainly by resentment of Western dominance with no shared vision of what replaces it?
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BRICS began as an acronym invented by Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O'Neill in 2001 to describe four fast-growing emerging markets — Brazil, Russia, India, China — that he predicted would collectively overtake the G7 economies by mid-century. The four countries liked the concept enough to start holding summits, added South Africa in 2010, and gradually evolved the grouping from an investment thesis into a geopolitical platform.
The 2023 Johannesburg summit was the most significant moment in BRICS history: six new members were invited (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Argentina — though Argentina subsequently declined under Milei). The expansion transformed BRICS from a club of large emerging markets into something that aspires to represent an alternative to the Western-led international order. Whether that aspiration is achievable — whether BRICS can be more than the sum of its members' individual interests — is the central question about the grouping's significance.
See the dollar's reserve currency future, China's economic rise, and US-China decoupling.
The expanded BRICS (BRICS+) represents:
These numbers are genuinely impressive and reflect a real shift in global economic weight away from the G7. In 1990, the G7 accounted for approximately 50% of global GDP; today it is approximately 43%. BRICS+ has surpassed it by purchasing power parity measures.
But raw size is not the same as organisational coherence or effective power. BRICS has no common market, no mutual defence arrangement, no common currency, no binding dispute resolution mechanism, and no shared regulatory framework. It is, fundamentally, a summit process and a political signal — not an institution with the capacity to enforce rules or coordinate policy.
BRICS+ contains members with fundamentally incompatible interests and relationships:
India and China are strategic rivals with a contested border and competing regional ambitions. India participates in BRICS while simultaneously being a member of the Quad (the US-Australia-Japan-India security grouping explicitly designed to counter Chinese influence). India's participation in BRICS reflects its multi-alignment strategy, not alignment with China's agenda.
Saudi Arabia and Iran are regional rivals whose proxy competition has fuelled wars across the Middle East. They were both invited to join BRICS at the same summit, a Chinese diplomatic achievement — but their presence in the same club does not resolve underlying tensions.
Russia and Brazil/India/South Africa have very different relationships with the Western sanctions regime. Russia needs BRICS as a legitimacy platform and economic alternative to Western isolation. Brazil, India, and South Africa maintain significant Western economic and political relationships that they would not sacrifice for Russian solidarity.
The de-dollarization objective is shared rhetorically but not practically. As discussed in the dollar reserve currency analysis, creating a BRICS common currency faces the same obstacles whether the grouping has 5 or 10 members: no common institutions, incompatible monetary policy requirements, and the absence of the financial market depth that reserve currency status requires.
Beyond the rhetoric of a 'new world order,' the concrete deliverables of expanded BRICS are limited but real:
The New Development Bank (NDB): The BRICS development bank, headquartered in Shanghai, has approved approximately $33 billion in loans since its 2015 founding. It is a real institution with real lending capacity, offering an alternative to World Bank and IMF financing that does not require Western governance conditionality. Its scale is small relative to the World Bank ($100 billion+ annually) but it is growing.
Bilateral currency trade: BRICS members have expanded bilateral trade settlement in local currencies — most significantly China-Russia yuan-ruble trade, but also China-Brazil real-yuan arrangements. This reduces dollar dependency at the margins for intra-BRICS trade.
Political coordination in multilateral forums: BRICS members coordinate positions in the UN, WTO, WHO, and IMF, amplifying their collective voice in institutions whose governance they seek to reform. The call for increased IMF voting weight for emerging markets, reform of the UN Security Council, and alternatives to dollar-denominated commodity pricing are consistently advanced at BRICS summits.
The signal of alternatives: Perhaps the most significant BRICS contribution is demonstrating to developing countries that alternatives to Western institutions exist — that there is a choice, even if the alternative institutions are currently less capable. This competitive pressure has already prompted Western institutions to be somewhat more responsive to developing country concerns.
BRICS+ is more significant than Western commentators who dismiss it as irrelevant, and less transformative than its most enthusiastic advocates claim. It represents a genuine expression of multipolarity — the shift in global economic weight toward the non-Western world — and a real vehicle for political coordination among countries that feel underrepresented in existing Western-dominated institutions.
But it is not, and is unlikely to become, a coherent alternative world order. The internal contradictions are too deep, the shared interests too limited, and the institutional capacity too thin for BRICS to function as a genuine counterweight to the US-led order. The more accurate framing is: BRICS is one expression of a multipolar world in which no single country or grouping dominates, multiple institutional frameworks compete, and the rules-based international order that the US built is gradually being contested rather than replaced.