World’s biggest handshake at BRICS: Can it shake the world order?
The 18th BRICS Summit was held in New Delhi on September 12-13, 2026, under India's 2026 chairship, bringing together leaders of all 11 member states at Bharat Mandapam.
The summit's scale and symbolism drew attention as an expanded, 11-member bloc — now including Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Indonesia alongside the original five — met to discuss economic cooperation and reform of global governance institutions.
Analysts flagged that the enlarged grouping faces internal divergence: members hold different, sometimes conflicting, positions on trade, sanctions regimes, and relations with Western powers, which limits the bloc's ability to act as a unified strategic bloc.
BRICS continues to operate without a permanent secretariat or binding decision-making mechanism, relying instead on annual rotating chairship and consensus-based declarations, which constrains follow-through on agreed deliverables.
The summit's substantive outcomes were expected to be measured against concrete deliverables — payment-system interoperability, New Development Bank (NDB) lending commitments, and institutional reform proposals — rather than the symbolism of the leaders' meeting itself.
BRICS — Origin, Expansion, and Membership
BRICS began as an informal grouping identified in a 2001 Goldman Sachs research paper by economist Jim O'Neill, which projected that Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) would become dominant economies by 2050. The four countries began coordinating diplomatically from 2006 and held their first leaders' summit at Yekaterinburg, Russia, in June 2009. South Africa joined in 2010, making it BRICS from the 2011 summit onward. The bloc underwent its first major expansion in January 2024, admitting Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE as full members (Argentina was invited but declined); Indonesia joined as a full member in January 2025. A "partner country" tier — for states engaging in select meetings without full membership — was created at the 2024 Kazan Summit.
The scale of this year's gathering reflects the cumulative effect of the 2024-25 expansion rounds — the bloc now spans a far more heterogeneous set of economies and foreign-policy orientations than the original BRIC quartet, which is precisely why observers question whether it can translate size into unified action.
BRICS Institutional Architecture — What Exists and What Doesn't
Unlike the G7 or the EU, BRICS has no permanent secretariat, no binding voting mechanism, and no standing bureaucracy comparable to the WTO or IMF. Its two concrete institutional creations are the New Development Bank (NDB), established in 2014 at the Fortaleza Summit as a multilateral development bank, and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), a $100 billion currency-swap facility also agreed at Fortaleza in 2014 to help members address balance-of-payments pressure.
Key Details
- NDB: agreed July 15, 2014 (Fortaleza Summit, Brazil); began operations 2016; headquartered in Shanghai; founding subscribed capital of $50 billion (authorized capital $100 billion), split equally among the five founding members, each holding one vote with no member holding veto power
- CRA: established by treaty signed at Fortaleza, July 15, 2014; total committed size $100 billion (China $41bn, India/Russia/Brazil $18bn each, South Africa $5bn); up to 70% of any drawdown beyond a basic tranche is linked to an existing IMF program, limiting its independence from IMF conditionality
- No BRICS charter, treaty organization, or permanent secretariat exists; agenda-setting rotates annually with the chair country (India in 2026, succeeding Brazil in 2025)
- Decisions are by consensus declarations, not binding votes — a structural contrast with the EU's qualified-majority voting or the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism
Commentary on the 2026 summit's "symbolic weight" versus real impact turns on this institutional gap — without a secretariat or enforcement mechanism, summit declarations depend entirely on voluntary follow-through by each member, which is harder to secure across an 11-member bloc with divergent interests than it was across the original five.
Strategic Autonomy and India's BRICS Positioning
Strategic autonomy is India's long-standing foreign policy doctrine of engaging with multiple global power centres — including rival blocs — without binding alignment to any one axis, tracing its intellectual lineage to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of the Cold War era while adapting it to a multipolar, post-Cold War context. Within BRICS, this manifests as India simultaneously participating in a grouping that includes Russia and China (which favour alternatives to Western-led financial architecture) while maintaining separate deepening ties with the US-led Quad and G7 economies.
Key Details
- Non-Aligned Movement founded 1961 (Belgrade), with India (Nehru), Yugoslavia (Tito), Egypt (Nasser) among founding voices — the historical antecedent to India's current multi-alignment approach
- India is simultaneously a member of BRICS, the Quad, the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation), and G20 — illustrating multi-alignment rather than bloc alignment
- India has consistently opposed a common BRICS currency proposal (distinct from local-currency trade settlement, which it supports) — a position it holds as 2026 chair
- India's chairship theme for 2026: "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability"
India's approach to hosting this summit — pushing payment-system interoperability while resisting a shared currency or an explicitly anti-Western framing — is a direct application of strategic autonomy, positioning India as a bridge rather than a partisan within the bloc's internal divide between reformist and revisionist members.
- 18th BRICS Summit: New Delhi, September 12-13, 2026, Bharat Mandapam; India's chairship began January 1, 2026
- BRICS membership: 11 full members as of 2026 (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Indonesia)
- First BRIC summit: Yekaterinburg, Russia, June 2009; South Africa added 2010
- NDB: founded 2014, operational 2016, HQ Shanghai, founding capital $50 billion (authorized $100 billion)
- CRA: founded 2014, $100 billion total commitment; India's share $18 billion
- BRICS+ combined share: ~46% of world population, ~36% of global GDP (PPP)
- Partner-country tier created at the 2024 Kazan Summit