Brics was born as a geo-economic idea. It was never intended to be an anti-Western alliance. Yet geopolitics has steadily transformed it into something larger: a platform through which the Global South seeks greater strategic autonomy, a stronger voice in global governance and a more multipolar international order.
The original Brics—Brazil, Russia, India and China—were brought together by a simple proposition: their economic weight was rising faster than their representation in institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. South Africa joined in 2011, and the creation of the New Development Bank (NDB) in 2015 reflected the group’s developmental ambitions.
The objective was to reform the existing order, not overturn it. That distinction has become harder to maintain.
The Ukraine War and Western sanctions have given Russia strong incentives to use Brics to build alternative financial and trade arrangements. China has increasingly viewed the grouping as part of a wider effort to dilute Western dominance. The intensifying US-China rivalry, debates over the dollar and frustration across the Global South with Western double standards have further enhanced Brics’s appeal.
The post-2023 expansion has taken this process much further. With Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia joining the original five, Brics now has 11 member countries with very different strategic interests. Its growing membership gives it greater global weight, but also makes consensus considerably harder.
This is the central paradox of Brics. Its geopolitical relevance is increasing precisely as its internal coherence is becoming more difficult to sustain. West Asia provides the clearest illustration. Iran and the UAE sit within the same grouping despite sharply different regional security relationships. The failure of Brics foreign ministers to agree on a joint statement amid the 2026 Iran conflict showed the limits of treating the group as a geopolitical bloc.
The New Delhi Summit declaration sought a middle ground, calling for restraint and dialogue while avoiding a direct confrontation with either the US or Israel.
India’s 2026 chairship has consequently highlighted what Brics could realistically become. New Delhi has sought to keep geopolitics on the agenda without allowing it to consume the group. The New Delhi Declaration addressed conflicts, terrorism, United Nations reform and multipolarity, but the larger agenda remained developmental: health, food and energy security, technology, artificial intelligence, digital public infrastructure, critical minerals, supply chains and financial cooperation.
This approach reflects India’s broader strategic instinct. New Delhi does not see strategic autonomy as choosing between the West and the rest. It sees value in maintaining multiple partnerships simultaneously.
Brics is useful precisely because it does not require its members to abandon their relationships with the US, Europe or other institutions.This is also why Brics should not be mistaken for an emerging G-7 alternative. It is neither a military alliance nor a unified economic bloc. The NDB is small compared to the World Bank, while efforts to reduce dependence on the US dollar remain evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
The real significance of Brics lies in its flexibility. It gives emerging powers an additional instrument to hedge against great-power rivalry. China and Russia may want it to become a vehicle for a more fundamental restructuring of the international order. India, Brazil and several others are more interested in development, representation and strategic room for manoeuvre.
The future of Brics will depend on how these competing visions are managed. Expansion has given the grouping greater legitimacy across the Global South, but it has also created the possibility of a two-speed Brics—one part more revisionist, another more pragmatic and multi-aligned.
For now, the most useful way to understand Brics is neither as an anti-Western bloc nor as merely an economic club. Rather, it is becoming a platform for a more assertive Global South: one that wants greater agency without necessarily wanting to choose sides.
The evolution of Brics has thus been less a story of deliberate geopolitical transformation than of adaptation to a changing international environment. Its economic and developmental agenda remains the denser and more operational core, while geopolitics has given the grouping greater strategic significance.
India’s 2026 chairship has underscored precisely this distinction: the objective is not to create a new bloc against the West, but to make the Global South a more consequential actor in a fragmented and increasingly multipolar world.
Geopolitics may have expanded Brics, but development and economic cooperation will determine whether it can hold together. Grand declarations about multipolarity are par for the course. Its credibility, however, will ultimately rest on whether its diverse members can translate their shared dissatisfaction with the existing order into institutions that actually deliver.
The author is professor of international relations, King’s College London, and vice president for studies at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.