BRICS AT THE CROSSROADS

On 12 and 13 September 2026, leaders from eleven countries met at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi for the eighteenth BRICS Summit, India's fourth turn chairing a grouping that has grown from four countries in 2006 to a twenty-one-country architecture today. This report reads that summit, and BRICS as a whole, mainly through numbers, tables and charts, with prose kept for the places where a shift genuinely needs explaining.

What this report adds that most BRICS coverage does not

• A three-part motivation model, shown as a Venn diagram, that classifies all 21 BRICS members by why they actually joined, not just when

• A direct, four-way numerical comparison of BRICS+ against the G7, the G20 and the European Union on population, GDP, growth, trade and crude oil

• A membership map of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation against BRICS+, and a clear answer to whether the two add up to a 'strategic alliance'

• An implementation scorecard that checks, item by item, what BRICS has actually delivered against what it promised over two decades

• A currency-by-currency reality check on the New Development Bank's own bond book, showing precisely how far de-dollarisation has, and has not, gone

• A longer historical lens connecting BRICS to centuries of Indian Ocean trade and to the Bandung and Non-Aligned Movement generation, rather than treating it as a post-2008 invention

• A dedicated, unflinching section on the case against BRICS, not just the case for it

A public-opinion section covering what people in BRICS countries, and outside them, actually tell pollsters about the bloc and its leading powers, not just what governments say

Read The Full Report Here: