In 2001, a Goldman Sachs economist named Jim O'Neill coined the acronym BRIC — Brazil, Russia, India, China — to describe the four large emerging economies that, on his projections, would surpass the G7 in combined GDP within a few decades. The label was an investment thesis aimed at fund managers, not a political project; it lumped together countries with almost nothing in common but size and growth. By 2009 the four had appropriated it, held their first summit, and the following year added South Africa for the S — the bloc growing faster as a club than as an economy. By 2024, BRICS had expanded (BRICS+) to admit Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE, with a queue of applicants behind them. A finance-industry forecast had become the most serious institutional alternative to the Western-led order.
BRICS is more useful than its critics admit and less coherent than its members suggest. The bloc has built real institutions — the New Development Bank in Shanghai (a parallel to the World Bank), the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (a parallel to the IMF), and recurring talk of cross-border payment rails in non-dollar currencies — and offers the Global South a forum to coordinate on trade, climate finance, and reform of the UN Security Council. It is also an engine of ambiguity. Its members run radically different political systems (a vibrant democracy in India, a war-fighting autocracy in Russia, a one-party developmental state in China), hold radically different relationships with the West (close in India and Brazil, openly hostile in Russia and Iran), and pursue radically different economic models. China is by far the largest economy in the bloc — bigger than all the others combined — and BRICS' centre of gravity has shifted accordingly; from one angle it is a Chinese-led parallel system with Indian buy-in, and the unresolved China–India border rivalry sits awkwardly at its core. Whether the expanded BRICS+ becomes a coherent geopolitical actor or remains a useful diplomatic stage depends largely on whether Beijing and Delhi can manage their own century-defining rivalry.
The current multipolar moment — the relative decline of the US share of global GDP, the rising diplomatic confidence of the Global South, the visible erosion of Western institutional consensus — is operationalized through BRICS more than through any other forum. Whether the bloc de-dollarizes trade (slowly, unevenly, and against the inertia of the dollar's network effects), whether it expands further (Saudi Arabia is the most-watched fence-sitter), and whether it becomes the substrate of a genuine non-Western international order rather than a photo-op are among the most consequential open questions of the coming decade.