By
Shara A. Rondon
Africa-Press – Eritrea. Symbolism and Stagnation
“BRICS in the international system: very relevant countries, but a group of limited importance.” (Viola, 2015)
In 2009, BRICS held its first leaders’ summit in Yekaterinburg and since then has cultivated an oversized symbolic presence. BRICS promotes itself as the voice of emerging economies through annual summit declarations invoking multipolarity, South–South solidarity, and reform of the international order. The 2025 Rio Leaders’ Declaration repeated familiar refrains, reaffirming “support for a fairer international financial architecture and the need for IMF quota and governance reform.” (BRICS, 2025a) Still, the persistence of this language year after year highlights a tension at the heart of BRICS: namely, the bloc has been more successful in amplifying rhetoric than in transforming institutions. As Salzman (2019) notes, Russia further embraced BRICS as a rhetorical shield after annexing Crimea, but other members have hesitated to make it a true geopolitical bloc. Thus, while the symbolism remains potent, its practical impact is inconsistent.
Geo-Economics vs. Geopolitics
Here lies a major internal contradiction of BRICS: Russia has consistently tried to cast the group as a geopolitical counterweight to the West, while India and China have preferred focusing on it being a geo-economic coordination forum. As Salzman (2019) notes, after 2014, both India and China deprioritized BRICS, with India turning toward the U.S. and China building alternatives such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
This pattern is consistent with China’s broader use of other non-Western platforms. Beijing has staged high-profile events like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit and Victory Day parade to project itself as “the standard-bearer of a multipolar world led by the Global South.” (Yu, 2025) These alternative foci echo China’s approach within BRICS: framing itself as the voice of emerging economies while avoiding deeper or more controversial political commitments that might constrain its national agenda. This was evident in the cautious language of the 2022 Foreign Ministers’ Joint Statement, which recognized Ukraine only by “recalling national positions” at the UN. (BRICS, 2022a) In short, the bloc, always premised on solidarity, could not manage to muster a unified line during an emerging crisis. Thus, the South–South rhetoric is used more often as a mask to hide very real fractures when members’ strategic priorities diverge.
Institutions Without Integration
“The CRA is fully operational… yet no country has needed to request CRA resources.” (New Development Bank [NDB], 2025)
The creation of the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) was presented as a breakthrough in financial multipolarity. In practice, the CRA remains unused and the NDB, while approving nearly $33 billion in projects since 2015, is still modest compared to the Bretton Woods institutions it was meant to challenge. (NDB, 2022; NDB, 2023) Supportively, the 2025 Rio IMF Vision and the Joint Statement of BRICS Finance Ministers continued to press for quota reform and greater representation for emerging economies. (BRICS, 2025b) These demands echo similar calls in the 2013 Durban Declaration, the 2016 Goa Declaration, and the 2023 Johannesburg-II Declaration. This repetition emphasizes a core point of “non-action” for the organization: BRICS always succeeds in creating calls for new institutions but struggles when it comes to actualizing them into a coherent alternative system to the West.
Health and Work: Islands of Progress, Oceans of Inconsistency
“The BRICS Tuberculosis Research Network unites 40% of the world’s TB burden.” (BRICS, 2025c)
Health is often highlighted as a functional success story for BRICS. Since the 2011 Beijing Health Ministers’ Declaration, the bloc has pledged cooperation on tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and non-communicable diseases. (BRICS, 2011) The 2013 Cape Town Communiqué reiterated these commitments. (BRICS, 2013) The Goa Communiqué (2016) added universal health coverage. (BRICS, 2016) In 2022, the Beijing Summit endorsed the Vaccine R&D Center, which was formally launched in 2022 but remains at a networking stage. (BRICS, 2022b) By 2025, BRICS had announced a new “Partnership for the Elimination of Socially Determined Diseases and Infections.” (BRICS, 2025d) These initiatives demonstrate the bloc’s capacity to identify pressing challenges. Yet delivery remains partial and inconsistent, with national health systems taking precedence over bloc-wide coordination. The same pattern emerges in labor and education. The SME Action Plan 2025–2030 and the BRICS TVET Cooperation Alliance Charter promise inclusivity, digitalization, and vocational training. (BRICS, 2025e; BRICS, 2025f) Yet as Cooke and Rogovsky (2021) argue, BRICS firms show “clusters of excellence” in human-centered management like in the South African auto and Indian IT industry, but systemic integration is still lacking.
The Cohesion Tax of Diversity
“BRICS countries must rally more closely and practice true multilateralism.” (BRICS Think Tank Council [BTTC], 2022)
While BRICS’ diversity is often trumpeted as its strength, it can also very readily be seen as a primary weakness or obstacle. The bloc combines post-imperial powers (Russia, China) with post-colonial democracies (Brazil, India, South Africa). This heterogeneity makes unified action costly and complicated. Summit declarations from 2022 to 2025 repeatedly stress unity but the divergent domestic development models that are statist in Russia and China and pluralist in Brazil, India, and South Africa limit convergence and act as blocks against true integration initiatives. (Garcia & Bond, 2015; Lins Ribeiro et al., 2015) This problem appears in other forums as well.
At the 2025 SCO summit in Tianjin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with President Xi Jinping to reset strained ties, yet reports emphasized that the relationship was “not subject to the influence of any third party.” (Yu, 2025) This highlights how India’s engagement remains cautious within BRICS, especially where Beijing’s push for geopolitical leadership often clashes with India’s more pragmatic priorities. BRICS own think tank community (BTTC) recognizes the problem: BTTC Recommendations from 2022, 2023, and 2025 called for reform of IMF/WTO governance, climate action, and health system resilience. (BTTC, 2022; BTTC, 2023; BTTC, 2025) Yet these same recommendations tend to recur annually without any substantive action, underscoring the delivery gap between BRICS aspirations and outcomes.
Conclusion: Order-Reshaper or Just Talking Shop? Closing the Delivery Gap
If BRICS aims to be more than its declarations, it must translate these calls into measurable results. The Rio 2025 Declaration introduced new initiatives on climate finance, AI governance, and public health. But as it continues to expand its agenda into finance, health, energy, AI, and culture, the risk of agenda inflation grows. (BRICS, 2025a) As Salzman, Garcia, and Bond suggest, BRICS’ real credibility depends on the depth of its delivery and not solely on the strength of its rhetoric. In other words, if the near-term future of BRICS doesn’t start to show measurable results in areas like finance, health, and labor, then the bloc risks becoming seen by the global community as simply symbolic and not system-changing at all.
It should still be acknowledged that BRICS has established itself as a symbol of South–South solidarity and multipolarity over the last two and a half decades. Yet its greatest obstacle is not Western resistance but rather its own inability to deliver real results consistently because of internal dilemmas. Finance remains modest, health initiatives continue to be aspirational, and labor cooperation is fragmented. If the bloc can align its powerful rhetoric with more substantive delivery – by strengthening the NDB, scaling health networks, and institutionalizing human-centered development, for example – it may succeed in playing a constructive role in shaping a new global order that is not so exclusively centered around Western influence.
However, without more tangible achievement, BRICS will remain a forum of declarations rather than a platform of results. Which, ironically, is probably the very thing it should fear the most when it comes to the West: that countries like the United States will always see it as a largely irrelevant or mostly impotent international organization. As many scholars currently suggest, it will be judged not by summit communiqués and lofty declarations but by whether its promises reach the ground. So far, the global jury remains out.
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