BRICS and the Multipolar World Order: From Investment Thesis to Geopolitical Bloc

British economist Jim O'Neill, then head of Global Economic Research at Goldman Sachs, published Global Economic Paper No. 66: "Building Better Global Economic BRICs" on November 30, 2001. The paper argued that Brazil, Russia, India, and China would collectively rival the G6 economies within four decades, and that global institutions needed to be rebalanced accordingly. The paper was explicitly framed as an investment thesis — a framework for identifying high-growth emerging markets — with no proposal for political coordination among the four countries. The paper's central forecast proved directionally correct far faster than O'Neill anticipated.

The inaugural BRIC summit took place in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on June 16, 2009, attended by the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The meeting produced the Yekaterinburg Declaration and a BRIC Action Plan, focusing on reform of international financial institutions and greater voice for developing economies. The summit's timing — less than a year after the 2008 global financial crisis, which originated in the United States — gave it heightened symbolic weight: the four leaders represented economies that had weathered the crisis more robustly than the Western-dominated G7.

South Africa was formally admitted to the group on December 24, 2010, following a Chinese-led push to include an African voice. The group was renamed BRICS. South Africa's economy was significantly smaller than the other four members, but its inclusion reflected a deliberate political choice to represent the African continent and signal that BRICS was a geopolitical project beyond the original investment thesis. The first five-member BRICS summit was held in Sanya, China, in April 2011.

At the 6th BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, the five member states signed the agreement establishing the New Development Bank (NDB), capitalised at US$50 billion, to finance infrastructure and sustainable development in emerging economies. They simultaneously agreed the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), with US$100 billion in committed capital, to provide liquidity support to members facing balance-of-payments crises — a direct parallel to IMF facilities. The NDB's headquarters were placed in Shanghai. Together, the NDB and CRA represented the most concrete institutional challenge to the Bretton Woods architecture that BRICS had yet produced.

By 2018, the combined gross domestic product of BRICS member states, measured by purchasing power parity, exceeded that of the G7 for the first time. By 2024 the gap had widened: BRICS held approximately 35 percent of world GDP (PPP) against the G7's 30 percent, while the BRICS share of world population stood at around 45 percent compared to the G7's 10 percent. Measured at market exchange rates, the G7 retained a larger share (around 44 percent), but the PPP crossover was widely cited by BRICS governments as evidence of a fundamental shift in the centre of gravity of the global economy.

By 2022, more than 20 countries had formally applied or expressed interest in joining BRICS, including Algeria, Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Thailand, UAE, and Venezuela. The surge in applications reflected both the bloc's growing economic weight and a broader appetite among developing nations for alternatives to Western-dominated multilateral institutions. BRICS members spent much of 2022 and 2023 developing criteria and procedures for a formal expansion process.

The 15th BRICS summit, hosted by South Africa in Johannesburg, invited six countries to join the bloc from January 1, 2024: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. China's President Xi Jinping called it "a new starting point for BRICS cooperation." The expansion was the most significant since South Africa's 2010 admission and reflected a deliberate push, led primarily by China, to broaden the bloc's geographic and economic footprint. The combined GDP of the incoming members added major hydrocarbon exporters and two of Africa's largest economies to the group.

In a letter to all BRICS members dated December 22, 2023, Argentina's newly inaugurated President Javier Milei formally declined the invitation extended at Johannesburg, stating he did not consider it appropriate for Argentina to join. Milei, a self-described libertarian and anarcho-capitalist, had been elected in November 2023 on a platform of Western alignment and market liberalisation. His predecessor Alberto Fernández had accepted the invitation. Milei's reversal illustrated that BRICS membership carries ideological significance beyond economic interest, and that the bloc's appeal is not universal even among the Global South.

Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates formally joined BRICS on January 1, 2024, bringing membership to nine. Saudi Arabia, which had been invited alongside the other five at Johannesburg, announced it was still considering the matter and did not join immediately. Iran's inclusion was geopolitically notable, given Western sanctions against Tehran; its membership signalled that BRICS was not constraining itself to US foreign policy preferences. Saudi Arabia's hesitation highlighted the bloc's difficulty in attracting states that maintain deep economic ties with the United States.

On November 30, 2024, US President-elect Donald Trump posted on Truth Social demanding that BRICS countries commit to neither creating a new BRICS currency nor backing any currency to replace the US dollar — or face 100 percent tariffs and lose access to the US market. "The idea that the BRICS Countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER," Trump wrote. South Africa's government responded that there were no plans for a BRICS currency, clarifying that discussions focused on using national currencies in bilateral trade. The threat marked the starkest direct US response to BRICS' institutional development since the bloc's founding.

Saudi Arabia formally joined BRICS in January 2025, ending nearly a year of deliberation. Indonesia joined on January 6, 2025, becoming the tenth full member and the first Southeast Asian state in the bloc. Indonesia's President Prabowo Subianto had prioritised BRICS membership shortly after taking office in October 2024, reversing the hesitancy of his predecessor Joko Widodo. BRICS' ten full members now collectively represent the world's fourth most populous country (Indonesia), the world's largest oil exporter (Saudi Arabia), and the world's second and fifth largest economies by PPP (China and India).

By early 2025, Russia reported that approximately 90 percent of its trade within BRICS was conducted in national currencies. China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) had expanded to 1,467 indirect participants across 119 countries, providing a yuan-based alternative to SWIFT. A prototype of BRICS Pay — a proposed unified cross-border payment system — was demonstrated in Moscow in October 2024. Despite these incremental advances, no BRICS member had formally proposed a common currency, and the New Development Bank continued to issue the majority of its bonds in US dollars, reflecting the practical constraints of de-dollarisation even within the bloc's own institutions.

The 17th BRICS summit, held in Rio de Janeiro on July 6–7, 2025 under Brazil's presidency, produced a 31-page joint declaration titled "Strengthening Global South Cooperation for More Inclusive and Sustainable Governance." The declaration called for reform of the UN Security Council, the IMF, and the World Bank, and set climate finance demands on developed countries. Notably absent were any mention of a BRICS currency, any coordinated de-dollarisation strategy, or any explicit criticism of the United States. The Stimson Center described the outcomes as "mild" and "carefully choreographed," reflecting the bloc's internal complexities and external constraints under intensified US pressure.