Hendra Wijaya
India is hosting the annual BRICS Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi this weekend, seeking to elevate the international standing of the expanding coalition against the backdrop of acute geopolitical strains. The gathering on September 12 and 13 comes as the group grapples with internal diplomatic challenges brought to the forefront by the ongoing war involving Iran. Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in the Indian capital on Friday morning to take part in the high-stakes talks.
The summit takes place more than six months after the United States and Israel initiated military strikes against Iran, which officially entered the BRICS alliance in 2024. The prolonged conflict has battered the international economy and captured global attention, while exposing clear fractures within the bloc itself. A member state has endured months of strikes and launched attacks of its own against fellow members, placing Tehran and the United Arab Emirates on opposing sides of the conflict.
Over the coming weekend, leaders from these divergent nations will gather in the same room to make their third attempt at forging a shared consensus on the war. The escalating confrontation has underscored the practical difficulties of maintaining political cohesion across a diverse and rapidly growing coalition that seeks to represent the Global South.
Originally founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the grouping has broadened in recent years to incorporate Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. As the alliance approaches its 20-year milestone, international observers are closely evaluating whether the coalition is genuinely reshaping global governance or merely navigating its own internal contradictions.
Analysts observe that while the bloc has successfully accelerated the transition toward a more multipolar world, it continues to face substantial hurdles in presenting a unified, institutional alternative to the Western-led order. The US dollar continues to maintain its dominance over global finance, and persistent political divisions among member states have constrained the group's capacity to execute concerted foreign policy and security measures.
Despite these limitations, several political scholars argue that the group's effectiveness should not be judged solely by its ability to construct a complete replacement for Western structures. Instead, they suggest that the true measure of success lies in the bloc's capacity to make Western dominance significantly more challenging to exercise on the world stage.
According to Brazilian researchers Octavio Oliveira and Enzo Godinho from the BRICS Studies Group at the University of Sao Paulo, outside observers frequently undervalue the alliance because it has not generated the sweeping systemic upheaval that some anticipated. The scholars noted that although the bloc lacks the institutional machinery and capacity of the United Nations to resolve specific geopolitical crises, its existence provides an essential avenue for developing nations to amplify their priorities and bypass Western frameworks through direct cooperation.
From its inception, the alliance was established to challenge the prevailing international architecture rather than dismantle it entirely. The coalition took form in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and the breakdown of the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round negotiations, which had sought to restructure international trade rules to better serve developing countries.
Faced with these stalled reforms, emerging economies that were projected to become the world's next developed powerhouses recognized that their strategic interests would be far better represented through collective organization. By establishing an independent development agenda outside traditional international bodies and the United Nations system, the founding members mounted an immediate challenge to Western institutional dominance.
Sean Burges, an associate professor of international studies at Carleton University in Canada, highlighted that emerging powers have consistently sought greater authority within global systems they view as disproportionately controlled by Western capitals. Burges explained that the core priorities binding BRICS members together remain the pursuit of lucrative international commerce and a shared desire to curb Western political pressure regarding domestic governance and human rights standards.
Burges further noted that the group's fundamental orientation centers on securing national autonomy and economic growth rather than assuming the sweeping global governance responsibilities traditionally held by G7 nations. The alliance serves primarily as a vehicle for member states to pursue poverty reduction and national development through customized commercial and financial channels.
Among the practical mechanisms facilitating this shift are China's focus on delivering development assistance without political preconditions and Brazil's ongoing initiatives to establish direct central bank currency swap arrangements. These instruments have stimulated a substantial increase in economic transactions both among BRICS partners and across the wider Global South.
At the same time, the broader international system is reflecting these shifting dynamics. Burges pointed out that conventional lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are already evolving, as political and democratic conditions attached to international financial aid gradually diminish.
The geopolitical landscape has also shifted markedly since the early 2000s when the BRICS framework was first conceived. Geopolitical and policy analyst Guy Burton observed that the traditional concept of the West is itself fracturing, characterized by deepening strains in the transatlantic relationship between the United States and Europe.
This growing transatlantic fragmentation complicates the very target of the alliance's challenge, blurring whether the group is positioning itself against American or European influence. Consequently, while the collective economic weight of the expanded BRICS bloc remains massive, its ability to convert that scale into unified global governance remains constrained by internal divisions and evolving global alignments.
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