BRICS in the Transforming Political Organization of the World

Scholarly attention to BRICS has intensified amid accelerating transformations of the international system and the search for alternative models of global order. Established as an economic coalition, BRICS has progressively expanded its remit, positioning itself as a platform for the Global South and as an actor with growing political and normative ambitions. This article advances the argument that the political organization of the world is undergoing a shift from hierarchical to networked forms. Such a transformation produces configurations more complex than the familiar imagery of unipolarity or multipolarity dominated by great powers. BRICS itself increasingly reflects this networked logic, not least through practices of digital and institutional connectivity, thereby exhibiting a structural affinity with the broader reconfiguration of world politics. The analysis proceeds from a central research question: does this structural correspondence enable BRICS to strengthen its international role, and if so, by what means? Empirically, the article traces BRICS’s trajectory from an economic coalition that consolidated influence in global economic governance to a multidimensional grouping whose agenda now encompasses social, political, and developmental issues. Conceptually, it situates BRICS within debates on global governance, world order, and the changing logics of institutional design. The article concludes that BRICS possesses the demographic, economic, and institutional resources, as well as experience in networked and digital cooperation, necessary to embed itself in the emerging order. Its capacity to shape this order, however, will depend on mobilizing the “power of ideas”: advancing persuasive normative visions for the principles and structures of a new world political organization.

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