NEW DELHI, September 12 — India hosts the 17th BRICS Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi on Saturday, September 12, and Sunday, September 13, 2026, as the bloc seeks to raise its profile while navigating internal divisions. The summit comes more than six months after the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran, which has been a BRICS member since 2024. The United Arab Emirates also joined that year.
Russian President Vladimir Putin landed in New Delhi on Friday morning. This is the third attempt by member states to find consensus on the war that has dominated global attention and battered economies this year, with Tehran and Abu Dhabi on opposing sides of the conflict.
A bloc built to challenge the Western-led order
The grouping of emerging countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and in more recent years Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia — was created to challenge the Western-led order. As the alliance nears its 20-year anniversary, analysts say that while BRICS has helped make the world more multipolar, it has struggled to build a coherent alternative to the West. The bloc has created a platform outside Western-led institutions, giving Global South countries greater bargaining power and economic alternatives.
But the dollar remains dominant, and divisions limit collective action on foreign policy and security, according to analysts. Some experts argue that the success of BRICS should not be measured by whether it can pose an alternative to West-led institutions, but by whether it makes Western dominance harder to exercise.
“We tend to undermine any BRICS-led initiative as it is not the revolution we have expected,” said Brazilian researchers Octavio Oliveira and Enzo Godinho at the BRICS Studies Group at the University of Sao Paulo, in an emailed statement to Al Jazeera.
“Yes, it does not have the institutionality or the capacity of the UN to tackle specific geopolitical issues, but its mere existence is a much more important platform for Global South countries to express their voices and bypass the West in cooperation.” While BRICS was built to challenge the US-led Western order, it was never meant to replace it, the analysts said.
Shared priorities, limited collective weight
The bloc emerged after the 2008 financial collapse and the failures of the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round — trade negotiations that aimed to reform the international trading system in favour of Global South countries. “Countries that were spearheaded to become the next ‘developed’ nations understood that their voice would be best heard if they organised themselves as a group,” said Oliveira and Godinho.
BRICS emerged from these countries’ efforts to pursue a common development agenda outside traditional international organisations and the United Nations — and, in that sense, its very origins challenged the Western-led order, the Brazilian scholars said. Emerging powers wanted greater influence over institutions they felt were dominated by the West.
That priority still unites the group today, says Sean Burges, an associate professor of international studies at Canada’s Carleton University. “The two priorities uniting the BRICS countries are largely a desire to make lots of money through international trade and to see an end to the preachiness of the ‘West’ about where they are failing in terms of rights and democracy,” Burges told Al Jazeera. The analysts agreed that reform and greater autonomy have been far greater concerns for the BRICS bloc rather than overthrowing the unravelling liberal international order.
“Why would the BRICS want to take on the global governance responsibilities of the G7 members?” asked Burges. BRICS has offered its member countries alternative pathways for channelling trade and investment that serve the interests of the member countries — largely national development and poverty alleviation, he explained.
“Chinese concentration on development assistance without conditionality and Brazilian discussions of direct central bank currency swaps are two of the most obvious examples,” said Burges. This has resulted in a surge of economic exchange not only within the BRICS, but within the Global South in general, he added. Meanwhile, pressures on rights and democracy are disappearing as aid conditions — evidence of how institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are already changing, Burges argued.
A changing West, an unclear challenge
Concurrently, the very idea of the so-called West has changed dramatically since the early 2000s, when BRICS was conceived and formalised, operating in an entirely different global environment, points out Guy Burton, a geopolitical and policy analyst. The notion of the West is “breaking down now, with the transatlantic relationship between the US and Europe fracturing — so it’s unclear what BRICS would even be challenging, or whom, America or Europe,” Burton told Al Jazeera.
While BRICS’s economic weight is enormous — its ability to wield it collectively is not, the analysts agreed. The bloc accounts for nearly half the world’s population, 40 percent of global GDP, and more than a fifth of global trade, according to figures cited by Al Jazeera.
What to
