Seating four rivals at the same table was, on its own, a feat of diplomacy. At the 18th BRICS Summit, held on 12 and 13 September in New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought together Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian and Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled. China and India are long-term rivals with a history of border conflict, while Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are on opposing sides of the current war and have bombed each other. As recently as May, BRICS had failed to agree on a joint declaration. That the summit took place at all, and ended with a text every member could sign, was a modest multilateralist success.

The BRICS Summit was held amid a rapidly evolving international landscape. With the US government now manifestly an unreliable international partner, and often a hostile power intent on bullying others into submission, numerous states are looking to develop new alliances as a counterweight. In this context, BRICS states have additional motivations to cooperate. For instance, India, as its close relationship with the USA is tested, has fresh incentives to build a more positive relationship with China. Against this backdrop, the BRICS bloc could become a more significant forum.

BRICS members account for 49 per cent of the world’s population. The bloc positions itself as the voice of the global south, with the stated aim of rebalancing an international system where global north states have too much power. But what’s on offer is a profoundly old-fashioned, state-centric version of multilateralism where citizens have little say.

Twenty years of growth

The name of the bloc, initially BRIC, was coined in 2001 by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill to describe the four emerging economies – Brazil, China, India and Russia – he predicted would collectively reshape the global economy. The four countries formed the group in 2006, held their first summit in 2009 and became BRICS when they admitted South Africa the following year.

The bloc launched its New Development Bank in 2014. Open to non-members, it seeks to offer an alternative to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which reflect the interests of powerful global north states. BRICS has also pushed for reform of the World Trade Organization on the same basis.

The BRICS group expanded in 2023, when six more states – Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – were invited to join, although Argentina, under far-right Trump ally Javier Milei, rejected the invitation. The bloc now has 11 full members and a growing network of partner countries including Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba and Malaysia.

As a result of its expansion, BRICS now accounts for 28 per cent of the global economy and roughly a quarter of international trade. The New Development Bank has approved billions of dollars in development funding to global south countries historically marginalised by financial institutions.

A hollow declaration

However, when it comes to political rather than economic cooperation, it doesn’t take long for the contradictions to surface.

Xi, who called for international rules to be ‘written by all countries’, leads a one-party state where increasingly only he writes the rules. Putin urges greater representation for Africa, Asia and Latin America on the United Nations (UN) Security Council, but frequently wields his veto power to stop the council taking action, including over his war on Ukraine.

The New Delhi Declaration’s silences speak loudest. The text is explicit on Palestine, calling on Israel to end its war on Gaza, opposing forced displacement, supporting the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and backing a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. But on the war in Iran, it calls only for ‘maximum restraint’ and condemns attacks on ‘civilian infrastructure’ and ‘peaceful nuclear facilities’ without naming Iran, Israel or the USA. With Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE sitting around the same table, it could go no further.

Meanwhile, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is entirely absent from the text. This represents a regression from the 2025 Rio de Janeiro Declaration, which referred to ‘relevant proposals of mediation and good offices’ and expressed hope that ‘current efforts will lead to a sustainable peace settlement’, and the 2024 Kazan Declaration, which named the conflict directly. In bilateral talks, Modi has urged Putin to end the war, but the war’s omission from the statement offers a troubling sign that Putin envisages no immediate end to the fighting. The declaration offers only general platitudes about the peaceful resolution of conflicts that will ring particularly hollow in Ukraine.

The declaration also condemns ‘indiscriminate rising of tariffs’ and ‘unilateral sanctions’ without naming the USA, reflecting the reluctance of members such as India, which is reportedly finalising a trade deal with the USA, to risk Donald Trump’s anger. The declaration preserves a fragile consensus through carefully calibrated language that often says little. BRICS still struggles to find political, as opposed to economic, consensus, tending to affirm broad principles that fall short of collective action.

Closed civic space, open defiance

BRICS claims it wants to democratise the international order, but this means redistributing power among presidents, not populations. Civic space is closed in seven of BRICS’ 11 states and obstructed or repressed in the rest, leaving people with little influence over the decisions being taken in their name.

Russia systematically censors and jails opposition voices, driving them to exile. It has shut down independent media and made protest all but impossible, with restrictions intensifying as the war has continued. China subjects its people to mass surveillance and clamps down on any acts of political and cultural expression that don’t conform to the ruling party line. Iran has violently suppressed protest movements, including by applying the death penalty. Saudi Arabia and the UAE recognise no legitimate role for independent civil society. Ethiopia has yet to be held accountable for the extensive human rights violations committed during its civil war and has actively worked to shut down UN scrutiny.

India, now positioning itself as a mediator power in BRICS, has seen its civic space increasingly attacked by Modi. Press freedom has declined, laws have been instrumentalised to restrict civil society funding, and religious minorities face escalating hostility.

Domestic repression of civic space translates into international-level denial of civil society voices. After 18 summits, BRICS still has no constitutive treaty, no membership criteria, no permanent secretariat, no common budget and no mechanism for civil society to hold its members to account. This lack of structure and accountability is no accident. It leaves powerful presidents free to assert their interests.

As a result, civil society has less influence in BRICS than in other similar blocs such as the G20, and far less than in UN processes, even though some BRICS members, notably China, work to exclude civil society there and retaliate against those who take part. Still, civil society mobilised around the New Delhi meeting. Three weeks before the official summit, over 200 delegates from farmers’ organisations, people’s movements, trade unions, women’s organisations and other civil society groups gathered in New Delhi for the People’s BRICS Summit.

The People’s Summit’s resolution denounced BRICS states for reproducing extractivist and inequitable development models and pointed out that cooperation between global south states should be judged not by the freedom it allows states and capital, but by the dignity and rights it affords to people and communities across the global south.

The meeting called for tangible commitments to reduce inequality and restructure debt. It called for a democratic and publicly accountable energy transition, digital rights and democratic data governance, food sovereignty, universal social security and women’s political representation. It demanded respect for international human rights obligations, including an end to the persecution of civil society activists and organisations. Civil society also called on BRICS to take a clear stand against military intervention, occupation and genocide. BRICS member states chose not to hear its calls.

Ambition without accountability

BRICS is growing in prominence amid a broader search for new international partnerships that no longer centre on the USA. The trend includes the European Union’s pursuit of closer ties with Canada, Canada’s moves to bring middle powers together in the Partners for Multilateralism initiative, and attempts to increase European defence cooperation at a time when NATO’s promise of collective defence can no longer be assured.

BRICS has an ambition, on display in the New Delhi Declaration, to reshape international financial arrangements, including by seeking greater autonomy through alternative payment systems that don’t depend on the US dollar. This would chip away at the USA’s unique ability to sustain its global power despite mountainous debt by simply printing more dollars to meet unceasing demand for them. But it would also enable repressive states such as Iran and Russia to sell their oil and gas more easily, funding their domestic repression while making international sanctions much less effective.

None of BRICS’ ambition comes with any commitment to accountability. There’s no channel through which the communities most affected by its decisions can make their voices heard, and no human rights conditions are attached.

While BRICS leaders measure success in geopolitical leverage, civil society, as it did at the People’s BRICS Summit, urges them to put people rather than states at the centre, valuing dignity, freedom, human rights and peace. So far, BRICS leaders have shown no willingness to hold themselves to such standards.

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