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When discussing the future of BRICS, the intergovernmental organization comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, we are discussing not only the future of an economic cooperation mechanism, but also a major proposition concerning the development direction of human civilization in the twenty-first century. The BRICS countries have grown from an economic concept to a key force in global governance, and their significance has long surpassed the BRICS’s geopolitical boundaries — it represents the reconstruction of the global order by emerging forces accounting for 50 percent of the world’s population, and carries the historical mission of innovation in the South-South cooperation paradigm.
Wang Wen is Executive Dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at the Renmin University of China.
BRICS’s Revolutionary Contributions
BRICS makes three revolutionary contributions, the first of which is the way in which it breaks unipolar hegemony and fundamentally adjusts the global power structure. When the BRICS countries proposed “promoting the reform of international financial institutions” at the first summit in 2009, IMF quota reform had been stagnant for ten years. Today, the New Development Bank (NDB) has approved projects totalling over 30 billion US dollars, and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) has built a 100-billion-dollar safety net, proving with action that global governance does not need to be monopolized by a few countries forever.
The BRICS countries have promoted the reform of the IMF quota and defended the “special and differential treatment” of developing countries in the WTO, which is essentially rewriting the logic of the global rule-making power distribution over the past 100 years.
At the same time, BRICS moves beyond the “centre-periphery” paradigm. We are witnessing the maturity of the first non-Western-led multilateral cooperation mechanism in human history. The mutual recognition of technical standards in the digital economy among BRICS countries (such as 5G spectrum coordination), the joint research of the BRICS Vaccine R&D Centre, and the data sharing of remote sensing satellite constellations mark a shift of the knowledge production system from one-way output to multi-directional coordination. More importantly, this cooperation always follows the principles of “informality, gradualism, and consensus” — this is the modern practice of the wisdom of “harmony but difference” in Eastern civilization.
Thirdly, BRICS serves to reshape the ethics of development by demonstrating the diversity of paths to modernization. When the BRICS countries increased their mutual trade volume by 300 percent in 15 years but did not follow the traditional free trade route to establish a unified customs union, this precisely reflected the respect for development autonomy.
China’s socialist market economy, India’s digital public infrastructure, Brazil’s bioenergy revolution, South Africa’s community medical model, and Russia’s Arctic development experience together constitute a vivid map of “pluralistic modernity”. This non-ideological pragmatic cooperation provides new ideas for humanity to solve the eternal problems of growth, distribution, efficiency, and fairness.
Reefs and Storms: Realistic Challenges Facing the BRICS Ship
BRICS cooperation is faced with a tension between mechanism and flexibility. BRICS is currently still a “forum-type” cooperation mechanism, and the New Development Bank only accounts for 3 percent of the financing scale of global multilateral development institutions. As the member countries expand from five to ten, how to balance decision-making efficiency and representation? How to establish a binding action framework in specific areas such as food security and climate financing? This tests our institutional design’s wisdom.
There is also a structural contradiction between the right to development and the right to speak on the world stage. Although the BRICS countries contribute 50 percent of global economic growth, they only have 13.24 percent of the voting rights in the World Bank and less than 5 percent of the local currency settlement in the SWIFT system. What is more serious is that some countries have made technical standards and industrial chain reviews universally secure. In 2023 alone, BRICS companies have encountered 127 “long-arm jurisdiction” sanctions. This reveals a cruel reality: the counterattack of the vested interests of the stock system may be more intense than expected.
BRICS cooperation is essentially a quiet revolution — it is not to destroy the existing system, but to prove that the world can achieve common evolution in mutual respect.
Lastly, the dialectical relationship between value consensus and interest differences represent an ongoing challenge. The different positions of member countries on the Ukrainian crisis and the technical disputes over trade subsidy policies remind us that emerging economies are not homogeneous entities. When South Africa’s per capita GDP is only one fourth of China’s and India’s dependence on energy imports reaches 90 percent, how to coordinate short-term demands and long-term vision? This requires strategic patience beyond traditional geopolitical thinking.
Crossing the Fault Line: A Pragmatic Path to Building BRICS Cooperation 2.0
To further strengthen BRICS cooperation, I propose building the physical pillars of the so-called “three communities”. These communities are:
- Food and Energy Community: Establish a joint reserve mechanism, build a ten-million-ton strategic reserve covering wheat, corn and fertilizer, and develop a joint BRICS agricultural science and technology research plan.
- Digital Innovation Community: Promote the interconnection between India’s unified payment interface (UPI) and China’s cross-border payment system (CIPS), and set up joint laboratories in the fields of 6G and quantum computing.
- Green Finance Community: Issue “carbon-neutral” special drawing rights, and achieve a green project share of more than 60 percent of the New Development Bank by 2027.
BRICS must also move towards building a “dual circulation” system network. This entails both internal circulation, i.e. piloting the BRICS Free Trade Zone early harvest plan, and taking the lead in realizing mutual recognition of rules of origin in five fields such as electric vehicles and medical devices, as well as external circulation, meaning establishing a “BRICS+” policy coordination mechanism with the African Union and ASEAN.
Lastly, we must innovate the practice platform for mutual learning among civilizations. That means establishing a digital library of BRICS cultural heritage, publishing the Multiple Modernities Development Report every year, and supporting member countries’ universities to jointly open a discipline system of “Global South Studies”. More importantly, we should use the successful practices of BRICS countries in poverty reduction (China), community health (South Africa), digital governance (India), and other fields to construct a narrative discourse different from neoliberalism.
Let the Torch of History Illuminate the Future
When the Berlin Conference divided up Africa with a ruler back in 1884, the participants would not have thought that 140 years later on the Brazilian plateau, once marginalized countries would redefine the grammar of global governance. BRICS cooperation is essentially a quiet revolution — it is not to destroy the existing system, but to prove that the world can achieve common evolution in mutual respect.
Just as different tree species in the Amazon rainforest share nutrients through underground mycorrhizal networks, let us use this wisdom as a guide to build a truly inclusive and sustainable new form of human civilization. When our descendants look back on this era, may they remember: at the crossroads of history, there was a group of thinkers and practitioners from the Global South who chose cooperation rather than confrontation and forged new possibilities for humanity.
This article is based on a presentation given at “BRICS Ascendant”, a workshop hosted by the Progressive International and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Brasília, Brazil in May 2025.
