Africa: Brics Summit 2024 – Everything, Everywhere, All At Once?

analysis\n\nUshering in a multipolar order requires a streamlined and coherent political agenda – not unfocused expansion.\n\nThe 16th BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, concluded last week with the usual grand declaration of the group\\'s commitments, concerns and aspirations.\n\nMany media headlines, particularly in Western countries, focused on how the summit and BRICS generally, symbolised Moscow\\'s ability to circumvent the fallout of sanctions by turning to the global south. In this way, BRICS is indirectly viewed as a threat to Western efforts to isolate Russia, weaken its power projection capabilities, and end its invasion of Ukraine.\n\nWestern governments and analysts often struggle to frame BRICS\\'s evolution beyond a binary, zero-sum narrative in which the group is a key geopolitical challenge to the Western-dominated international order. This interpretation places the forces of democracy and liberal political values in one camp and authoritarian governments in another, with certain developing countries caught in the middle, trying to play one side off the other for their own benefit.\n\nThere is some merit to these kinds of headlines. Russia and China are primarily major status-quo powers. Both have been permanent United Nations Security Council (UNSC) members since its establishment. Moscow was the \\'other pole\\' in the international order for most of the 20th century, a position Beijing is working towards. And the foreign policy goals of both place them in confrontation with the United States and its Western allies.\n\nSo, are these two countries in a position to champion the global south\\'s cause, and why haven\\'t more representative bodies like

the Non-Aligned Movement played a more prominent role?\n\nThe preoccupation with Russia and China detracts from BRICS\\'s broader, underlying geopolitical project – the need for global south countries to reform and shape the international order\\'s future direction on their own terms.\n\nThese include greater representation and agency in global policy- and decision-making bodies and facilitating greater freedom to trade, invest and borrow money outside the Western-dominated financial system. They also include a more just and equitable global power balance that reflects modern realities.\n\nIn pursuing these aims, BRICS countries have made steady progress on developing a shared strategic agenda for increased cooperation across various policy domains.\n\nThe Kazan summit\\'s 32-page outcomes declaration covers almost everything from reforming the UNSC and Bretton Woods institutions to climate change, biodiversity and conservation. It also covers challenges from global crises, conflicts and terrorism and a suite of economic development, health, education, science and cultural exchange-related issues.\n\nThe group\\'s ballooning cooperation agenda may indicate progress. But it could also signify the limits of its diverse members\\' ability to agree on \\'hard\\' political and security matters central to the core business of reforming the international order.\n\nThe expansion of BRICS\\' substantive agenda and its membership dilutes its primary purpose and reinforces the binary, zero-sum Western narrative its members constantly try to shed.\n\nTangible, albeit gradual, progress on establishing intra-BRICS institutions and processes such as the Interbank Cooperation

Mechanism, the cross-border payment system and its independent reinsurance capacity suggest that BRICS\\' clout and credibility are growing.\n\nThese initiatives could enable members to pursue their international economic objectives without the constraints and transactional costs associated with traditional financial bodies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Ideally, this would improve their relative positions of global power and influence, and help deliver a more multipolar international order.\n\nIn contrast, deepening cooperation on big cat conservation, while important, doesn\\'t serve that purpose. Nor does facilitating youth exchanges on sports and healthy lifestyles or championing a BRICS alliance for folk dance. Including these kinds of initiatives in BRICS\\' growing agenda detracts from its core objectives.\n\nMore worryingly, this suggests that BRICS\\' diverse constellation of member states is pursuing the path of least resistance – expanding their cooperation in every direction, hoping something eventually sticks.\n\nInstead of doubling down on hard strategic questions about a shared conception of multipolarity, and the steps necessary to reform global governance and security institutions, BRICS seems to be heading for greater expansion and formalisation. And with that come the risks, challenges and institutional dependencies that have led to the stagnation and ineffectiveness plaguing more established international organisations in recent years.\n\nPerhaps the group\\'s core members recognise that they have very different ideas of what constitutes multipolarity. Russia (and China to an extent) envisage much more than global institutio