What began as an investment-bank acronym is now an expanded club of emerging powers. It can lend, it can convene, and it can irritate Washington. What it cannot yet do is agree on what it is for.
Published 14 October 2026 · 06:00 GMT
The letters began as a marketing label. In 2001, Jim O'Neill, then chief economist at Goldman Sachs, grouped Brazil, Russia, India and China under the acronym BRIC and argued that these four large economies would reshape world growth. The bankers meant it as a fund category. The politicians heard something else: a club. Eight years later, in 2009, the four leaders met for a first summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and the acronym became an institution. South Africa joined in 2010, adding the S, and a decade and a half later the club has grown again, larger, louder and harder to define.
That growth is the story of this explainer. On 1 January 2024, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates joined as full members, roughly doubling the bloc's membership at a stroke. Indonesia followed as a full member in January 2025. Argentina, invited alongside the others, declined after a change of government in late 2023. Saudi Arabia was invited too and has kept its status ambiguous, attending as an invited partner while avoiding a formal answer. The result is a bloc that now stretches from Latin America to the Gulf to Southeast Asia, and that contains monarchies and republics, democracies and autocracies, oil exporters and oil importers, and two neighbours, India and China, whose soldiers have clashed on their shared border.
Size is the bloc's calling card, and it is real even if the exact figures move with the definitions. The expanded membership holds well over a third of the world's people. By some IMF-based measures, it produces a larger share of world output in purchasing-power terms than the G7, the club of advanced economies that has set the tone of global economic governance since the 1970s. Measured at market exchange rates rather than purchasing power, the comparison is closer, and the G7 remains far richer per person. Both statements are true. Which one matters depends on whether you think power comes from total weight or from wealth per citizen, and the bloc's own publicity prefers the measure that flatters it.
The bloc's most concrete achievement is a bank. At the 2014 summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, the members created the New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai, to finance infrastructure and sustainable development in emerging economies. It was a deliberate mirror of the World Bank, built on the argument that existing lenders were too slow, too conditional and too dominated by Western shareholders. Alongside it came a Contingent Reserve Arrangement of about 100 billion dollars, a pool members could draw on in a balance-of-payments squeeze. The bank has since approved loans for roads, water, metro lines and clean energy across its members, and it has increasingly raised money and lent in local currencies rather than dollars.
The second thing the bloc does is convene. Annual summits, foreign ministers' meetings, and a thicket of working groups on health, science, trade and security give emerging powers a room where the United States and Europe are not setting the agenda. The declarations that emerge are often long and vague, but they matter as signals: a shared language on reforming the UN Security Council, on expanding the voice of developing countries at the International Monetary Fund, and on trading in local currencies. For smaller members such as Ethiopia and Egypt, a seat at that table is itself a form of recognition, and for the founders it is proof that the world has more than one organizing centre.
The third thing the bloc does is irritate. Western governments watch every summit for signs of a coordinated challenge to the dollar, to sanctions, or to the institutions built after 1945. Sometimes the irritation is earned: members have discussed settling more trade in their own currencies, and Russia, cut off from dollar finance by sanctions, has been the loudest advocate. Sometimes it is overread. No BRICS common currency exists, none has been agreed, and the members with the most to lose from a dollar rupture, notably India and the Gulf states, have repeatedly poured cold water on the idea. The bloc's bark on de-dollarization remains louder than its bite.
The deepest limit is internal. BRICS contains rivals as well as partners. India and China compete for influence across Asia and the Indian Ocean, and their border dispute has produced deadly clashes in recent years. Brazil and India are democracies whose trade is deeply tied to the United States and Europe. Iran and the Gulf monarchies sit on opposite sides of the Middle East's central rivalry. Russia wants the bloc to be a battering ram against Western sanctions. Most other members want it to be a megaphone for a fairer economic order, not a weapon in someone else's war. A club that contains both the sanctioned and the sanctions-wary will struggle to act as one.
The second limit is economic. For all the talk of a new order, the members' most important trading relationships remain with the West and with China, not with each other. Brazil sells soy and iron ore to China. India buys Gulf oil. South Africa's banks are wired into London and New York. Intra-BRICS trade has grown, but it has not replaced the old map, and the bloc has no free-trade agreement, no customs union, no shared market rules. It is a political club with an economic vocabulary, and the vocabulary runs ahead of the plumbing.
The third limit is institutional. BRICS has no permanent secretariat, no headquarters, no binding rules, and no mechanism to enforce a decision. Its presidency rotates annually, its declarations are consensus documents that smooth over disagreement, and its expansion has made consensus harder, not easier. Every new member adds a veto in practice, because nothing is agreed until everyone nods. That is a design choice, not an accident: the members want a platform, not a leash. But it means the bloc is better at issuing statements than at executing them, and its critics are right that a club that cannot say no to anyone cannot do much for anyone either.
Western coverage tends to read BRICS as a threat to be measured. The questions asked in Washington, Brussels and London are about the dollar, about sanctions evasion, and about whether the bloc is becoming an anti-Western axis. In this telling, the 2024 expansion matters because it brought Iran, under Western sanctions, inside the tent, and because it showed that the club could grow even as its founders quarrelled. The Western lens is attentive to what the bloc does with money: local-currency settlement, the New Development Bank's lending, and any hint of a parallel payments system.
But the Western telling also notes, often in the same breath, how little of the threat has materialized. No common currency. No sanctions-busting machinery that has changed the course of the war in Ukraine. No collective defence pact. The West's settled view is that BRICS is a real symptom, a genuine demand from emerging powers for more voice, wrapped around an institution that is too divided to be a rival order. The danger, in this reading, is not that BRICS replaces the old order but that the old order ignores the demand long enough for a rival to harden.
Coverage from within the bloc's largest members reads BRICS as a correction, not a conspiracy. In Beijing and Moscow, the story is multipolarity: a world with several centres of power, in which the rules are negotiated rather than handed down. In this telling, the New Development Bank matters more than any summit declaration, because it is an institution that exists, lends, and answers to shareholders who are not the United States or Europe. The expansion is read as proof of demand: countries queued to join because the existing order offered them lectures and loans with conditions attached.
The Eastern lens is also the most candid about the bloc's fragility, because it lives with it. Chinese and Indian commentary alike acknowledge that the two countries' rivalry caps what the bloc can do, and Russian commentary has at times complained that the other members will not go as far as Moscow wants. The Eastern reading is therefore two-sided: BRICS is the most credible vehicle yet for a more balanced order, and it is a vehicle whose passengers keep grabbing the steering wheel.
From the Global South, the bloc looks like an audition. For Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia, membership is a way to diversify partnerships, to borrow from more than one window, and to be heard in rooms where their interests were once an afterthought. In this telling, the question is practical, not ideological: does membership bring cheaper finance, better trade terms, or a louder voice at the IMF? The New Development Bank's local-currency lending is watched closely here, because borrowing in dollars has repeatedly turned exchange-rate swings into debt crises for poor countries.
The Southern lens also carries a warning. A bigger BRICS could simply reproduce the old hierarchy with new managers: China as the dominant economy, Russia as the loudest voice, and smaller members as decoration. The test, in this reading, is whether the expanded bloc gives its smallest members real weight, or whether it becomes another room where the big speak and the small applaud. On that test, the jury is still out, and the South knows it.
