This weekend, leaders of the BRICS bloc of major emerging economies will convene in New Delhi for their annual summit, hosted by India. The gathering, taking place on September 12 and 13, comes as the group continues to grapple with deep internal divisions over a regional conflict that has roiled global markets and strained international alliances this year, marking the bloc’s third attempt to reach a unified consensus on the crisis.
Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in New Delhi on Friday, setting the stage for talks that will test the bloc’s ability to bridge competing interests. The conflict at the center of divisions is the U.S.-led military campaign against Iran, which joined BRICS as a new member in 2024 alongside the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. The rift has pitted Iran against the UAE, laying bare the competing geopolitical priorities that have long hampered coordinated action within the 11-nation bloc.
Founded in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and the collapse of the WTO’s Doha Development Round, BRICS was created to challenge the post-WWII Western-led international order that emerging economies argued systematically sidelined the interests of the Global South. Nearly 20 years after its formation, analysts agree the bloc has succeeded in making the global order more multipolar, but it has struggled to build a cohesive alternative framework to replace Western-dominated institutions.
Many experts argue that measuring BRICS success by its ability to replace Western-led institutions misses the point of the bloc’s core mission. “We tend to underestimate every BRICS initiative because it is not the revolution we expected,” note Octavio Oliveira and Enzo Godinho, Brazilian researchers at the University of São Paulo’s BRICS Studies Group. “While it lacks the institutional capacity of the United Nations to address major geopolitical issues, its very existence provides a critical platform for Global South nations to amplify their voices and pursue cooperation outside Western frameworks.”
Analysts emphasize that BRICS was never intended to fully displace the Western order, only to offer Global South countries greater negotiating power and alternative pathways for development. “What unites BRICS members above all is the desire to grow their economies through international trade and put an end to the West’s moral lecturing on human rights and democracy,” explains Sean Burges, an associate professor of international studies at Carleton University in Canada. Reform and greater autonomy, rather than overthrowing the liberal international order, are the bloc’s core priorities. Burges questions: “Why would BRICS want to take over the global governance responsibilities of the G7?”
To date, BRICS has delivered tangible alternative channels for trade and investment centered on national development and poverty reduction. China’s model of unconditional development assistance and Brazil’s push for direct currency swaps between central banks are prime examples, Burges says. These initiatives have driven a sharp increase in economic exchange within BRICS and across the broader Global South, while the shift away from aid conditionalities has even pushed traditional Western-dominated institutions like the World Bank and IMF to reform their own practices.
Geopolitical analyst Guy Burton points out that the definition of “the West” has shifted dramatically since BRICS was founded in the early 2000s, creating a more ambiguous landscape for the bloc’s challenge. “The West is fracturing, with the transatlantic alliance between the U.S. and Europe wobbling, so it is unclear exactly what BRICS is challenging — America or Europe,” Burton notes.
While BRICS holds enormous collective economic weight — representing nearly half of the global population, 40 percent of global purchasing power, 44 percent of global oil production, and roughly a quarter of total world trade, with projected 2025 growth of 3.7 percent compared to just 1 percent for the G7, per IMF data — analysts agree its collective global influence remains far more limited than its size suggests.
The bloc’s New Development Bank (NDB), its flagship multilateral financial institution, had only approved around $39 billion in lending by the end of 2024 — equal to just a few months of the World Bank’s total lending commitments. The NDB also raises the majority of its capital in U.S. dollars, and analysts say it has introduced little structural innovation, sharing many core characteristics with existing Western-led multilateral development banks.
The single biggest barrier to BRICS challenging Western economic dominance is the continued global dominance of the U.S. dollar. “Despite widespread rhetoric around de-dollarization initiatives, most BRICS trade is still settled in dollars, and most members hold large dollar reserves, which reinforces the dollar’s position as the global reserve currency and limits members’ policy autonomy,” Oliveira and Godinho explain. While China has promoted wider use of the renminbi and Saudi Arabia has opened up to trade in non-dollar currencies, the dollar faces no serious near-term challenge, a trend Burton expects will hold for at least the next decade. Still, Imran Khalid, a geostrategic analyst, notes that while BRICS as a whole has not abandoned the dollar, individual members are gradually reducing their own dependence in a slow, largely irreversible shift.
Even with these limitations, analysts argue BRICS’ economic contributions should not be discounted. The 2024 expansion that added major oil producers including Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the UAE has boosted the bloc’s collective influence, particularly in global energy markets. Chinese investments through the Belt and Road Initiative and other bilateral financing streams have also delivered concrete development and financing alternatives outside the traditional Bretton Woods system.
The bloc’s greatest strength — its broad representation of Global South populations — is also its biggest weakness: deep internal divisions driven by competing national interests. In May, a BRICS foreign minister meeting in New Delhi failed to reach a consensus on the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict, ending without a joint statement after Iran pushed to condemn U.S. and Israeli actions, a position the UAE refused to support. Notably, though, all major peace initiatives for the conflict have come from the Global South, not from Western capitals.
Burges argues that BRICS expansion has widened, rather than narrowed, internal divisions. “Expansion increases representation of the Global South, but it dilutes the group’s cohesion,” he explains. Membership gave Iran a new global platform, but that does not mean all BRICS members align with Iran’s positions. “BRICS does not operate on a ‘one for all, all for one’ principle — members deliberately retain their freedom to act independently, which is the opposite of a tightly coordinated geopolitical bloc,” Burton says. While the original smaller BRICS grouping struggled to represent the full diversity of the Global South, expanded membership risks undermining collective action, even as Oliveira and Godinho view growing interest from new members as a positive sign of a shifting multipolar global order.
In conclusion, analysts widely frame BRICS as more a platform for Global South autonomy than a direct challenger to the Western-led order. Without a common currency, unified trade tariffs, or collective defense commitments, it is not a conventional geopolitical bloc. Still, by creating alternative financing channels and facilitating trade outside Western institutions, it gives Global South nations greater room to maneuver between competing great power interests. Most importantly, experts note, it has already succeeded in weakening the effectiveness of Western political and economic pressure on individual developing nations.