Towards New Internationalism: To Revive the Bandung Spirit, We Must Go Beyond the BRICS
The BRICS have been eliciting strong reactions in every direction for almost twenty years, as the first informal meetings of its four original members—Brazil, Russia, India and China—occurred in 2006. In Yekaterinburg, in 2009, their heads of state met and formalized the group’s existence, adding South Africa the following year. Since then, it has been presented, in both favorable and hostile coverage, as the chief challenger bloc to the Western-led global order. Beyond that, however, public discourse generally pulls in two opposite directions, the BRICS representing either a formidable or impotent challenge, either a genuine alternative or an incoherent mish-mash of states incapable of agreeing on anything other than a vague anti-Westernism. The group’s large expansions since 2023, inducting six new full members (Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE) and nine partner countries (Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, and Uzbekistan), have only added to these tendencies.
Sometimes, however, the middle-ground cliché is vindicated: the BRICS is neither as disruptive as its enthusiastic champions hope, and alarmist critics fear; nor is it as negligible as more dismissive observers maintain. Many of its leading members, indeed, have significant differences, even occasional conflicts, preventing more holistic coordination. As a result of disagreements among the membership, the group’s most recent summit (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2025) produced a remarkably restrained joint statement: it criticized the US—by standing against “the proliferation of trade-restrictive actions” and “the imposition of unilateral coercive measures”—but without actually naming the country itself. Despite condemning Israel’s bombing of Iran and demanding its full withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Lebanon and Syria, the group has not mounted a challenge to the genocide in Gaza comparable to what the Third World countries dared against Apartheid South Africa (as seen below), and Israel itself, in the 1970s and 80s.
The group is also quite informal, loosely tied to a set of institutions with no binding commitments. Many mechanisms that garnered attention (such as a joint payment system and the notorious BRICS common currency) remain at the proposal stage. The institutions that exist, meanwhile, are not replacing those of the established order, but complementing them: e.g., the New Development Bank (NDB) vis-à-vis the World Bank; or the BRICS Contingent Reserve Agreement (CRA) vis-à-vis the IMF. Indeed, the group has never proposed a comprehensive alternative to the ruling order and its institutions, effusively upholding the UN, WTO, WHO, etc., and proposing only reforms to the system, such as increasing the geographic representativeness of its major fora.
At the same time, the very fact that so many countries have shown such an interest in joining this formation means that it holds a certain significance, as well as the fact that members’ engagement has not wavered even with drastic domestic political changes (e.g., Brazil with Bolsonaro). As several global analysts summarized, motivations vary from wanting “to create a more egalitarian mode of global governance, to hedge against Western instability while maintaining a geopolitical neutrality, or to participate in an alternate international economic system outside of the reaches of American sanctions.” The NDB has gained new members who are not in the BRICS, such as Colombia and Algeria, and is already funding projects around the world; BRICS thematic fora also meet regularly, fostering cooperation from science and technology to cultural activities. The notion of hedging, however, is perhaps the most relevant: joining the BRICS does not necessarily represent a hard anti-West alignment, but, rather, signals that one’s options remain open. German-Brazilian international relations scholar Oliver Stuenkel and others have shown, in fact, that rather than overthrow the existing world order, the BRICS have striven for a better standing within its hierarchy. To this end, building such a forum, with its attendant parallel institutions, serves to exert pressure on the status quo for change.
And yet, at the aforementioned 2025 summit, Brazilian president Lula went so far as to say that “BRICS is the heir to the Non-Aligned Movement.” He, along with Indonesian president Prabowo, also framed the group as embodying the legacy of the 1955 Bandung Conference, which birthed the Third World as a self-conscious political project, and paved the way for the NAM’s creation six years later in Belgrade. They are not alone in drawing these connections: the more alarmist critics and enthusiastic promoters of the BRICS see it as renewing the Bandung Spirit, and the former Third World challenge to global order. One account, despite acknowledging the moderate demands of the group, even considered that it “marks a historic shift in the balance of power on the world stage in which the formerly dispossessed are mustering their collective weight to take over the very institutions of a ‘rules-based order’,” a challenge that “can no longer be ignored as it was in the Bandung era.”
The BRICS is not the Third World
This raises two issues: first, the BRICS’ limited ambitions compared to the NAM of yore; and, second, the fact that this small group is not synonymous with the broader mass of developing countries. Indeed, it is a drastic departure from the two main institutions of the Third World: the NAM, a self-purported pole between the Cold War’s Eastern and Western blocs; and the Group of 77 (G77), created in 1964, and more focused on trade and development. Both of them accrued a broad membership, including almost every independent Third World country of the time; and, as a result, despite limitations in this regard, were more representative in comparison to BRICS.
These two, ultimately, stem from the same source: the BRICS was always intended to be a small group of leading non-Western powers—a counterpart to the G7—not an executive committee of the Global South. The acronym itself originated in a 2001 Goldman Sachs report about emerging economies; in more geopolitical terms, one may say that its original members were broadly considered to be rising powers. For this reason, aside from any material achievements, BRICS membership in itself is meant to confer a certain prestige. As I have written before, this reputational dividend is significant for Russia, especially after its invasion of Ukraine and the resulting Western drive to isolate it diplomatically. India and Brazil lack China’s economic might, but by being its peers in such a small club, they are able to “punch above their weight” and project themselves as global, rather than regional powers. This is why, according to behind-the-scenes reports, they both opposed the group’s expansion for many years: it would dilute that exclusivity. China, meanwhile, is the main force behind these successive expansions, as it does not need the BRICS for prestige, and benefits from a larger group through which it can shape global policy—but not so large as to become unwieldy, and informal to allow for flexibility. As the policy analyst Tong Zhao put it, “through selective membership invitations, the establishment of BRICS partnerships, and the engagement of nonmember states via informal dialogues, China hopes to more effectively coordinate non-Western positions.”
Public discourse on the BRICS, however, does not treat it solely as a club of rising powers narrowly focused on matters directly relevant to rising powers, but rather as a representative, and even a leader of the Global South. Sometimes the categories even become muddled into each other: for example, Jorge Heine, former Chilean diplomat and champion of what he calls “multi-alignment,” in a piece defending the concept of Global South, spoke only of rising powers and especially the BRICS to illustrate his points. The UN Development Programme’s landmark 2013 report, titled Rise of the South, similarly, often conflated the meteoric growth of certain major developing countries (and the geopolitical significance thereof) with the fortunes of the South overall.
The BRICS itself encourages this trend: the latest summit’s joint declaration was titled “Strengthening Global South Cooperation for a More Inclusive and Sustainable Governance.” And yet, it was only at its 15th summit in 2023 that the group first mentioned “Global South” in such a declaration—precisely when the first large BRICS expansion took place. At the original 2009 summit, the group’s purpose was “serving common interests of emerging market economies and developing countries”—the latter two terms forming the concept of EMDCs. While under one moniker, emerging markets and developing countries are still understood to be separate, with, as mentioned in the statement, converging interests in some respects. In 2025, however, this mission statement reads: “We believe BRICS countries continue to play a pivotal role in voicing the concerns and priorities of the Global South.”
As geographically nebulous as the concept of Global South is, no one considers Russia to be part of it (China’s membership is also often contested). There is no pretense, then, that the BRICS is a Global South organ per se; but, rather, that it can represent the Global South and further its priorities. Despite the BRICS’ growth in membership, it is still now what it originally was: a summit club of non-Western countries with significant regional or global economic/geopolitical heft.
Some, acknowledging the BRICS’ limitations, have still argued that it could “recover the spirit of Bandung” by committing to “anti-imperialism, economic justice, climate equity, and popular sovereignty,” and “listening to the voices from below.” The point here is that, being a group of rising powers, this is not likely to be the case. The interests of this kind of summit-level small group overlap in some regards with, but are not identical to, those of the Global South overall. The latter did not elect the former, and must assert their distinct aspirations through their own institutions.
Collective troublemaking
By contrast, the former Third World, embodied by the NAM and G77, had a propensity for what the scholar of Caribbean and Global South foreign policies Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner has called “collective troublemaking.” In 1974 alone, for example, they maneuvered around the UN’s rules to oust Apartheid South Africa from the General Assembly; they led the push to grant UN observer status to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), at a time when Israel and its Western backers questioned the Palestinian people’s very existence (referring to them only vaguely as Arabs); and, finally, the Third World also promulgated a comprehensive alternative worldmaking vision through the New International Economic Order (NIEO).
The fact that the NAM and G77 were not a small grouping of rising powers, but a much larger constituency, contributed to this audacity. Indeed, while some members, such as Algeria (presiding the General Assembly in 1974), India, Egypt, Cuba, Tanzania and Yugoslavia, assumed a more prominent role than others, they were not what we would today call emerging economies. Despite their numerous flaws, these organizations were and still are more representative than the BRICS. Indeed, while larger and more powerful members exert more influence, Braveboy-Wagner has stressed that the “G77 gives [smaller countries] a voice they would not have as individual nations,” and that, due to decision-making by consensus, “small nations can not only influence but even block the agenda.”
However, the greater breadth of membership is not a sufficient explanation; after all, both the NAM and G77 still exist, and aren’t the troublemakers they used to be. Rather, what made them so in the past was a combination of this breadth and a specific historical moment, when it could more readily be harnessed to such ends.
As Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere, proclaimed in 1979, the G77 was envisioned as a trade union for developing countries to bargain as one. Unlike joining the BRICS, there is no particular prestige of exclusivity to be gained through membership here; the benefits lie instead in the ability to act in concert with a great numerical majority (when possible). Despite the great diversity among them (including communist and anti-communist governments, absolute monarchies, democracies and dictatorships), the Third World countries still had enough in common to formulate a basic joint programme. This is why developed countries have, since then, consistently striven to remove issues crucial to them from the purview of the UN General Assembly and other bodies where they are outnumbered, in favor of smaller, more informal fora where they hold more sway; in the same vein, they still apply tactics pioneered by Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski to divide the opposition (e.g. cooptation through side-deals).
Amid such conditions, how did Third World countries manage to achieve some form of unity at all? A similar material situation is not enough to that end—those involved must also have a common understanding of what that situation means, of its source and potential solution. Nyerere summarized this common diagnosis at a G77 ministerial meeting: “We are not the prime movers of our own destiny. We are ashamed to admit it, but economically we are dependencies—semi-colonies at best—not sovereign states.”
Underdevelopment and dependency, then, were understood to be inextricable from sovereignty. Therefore, as political scientist Adom Getachew has argued, these countries also shared an understanding of self-determination as inherently requiring international support; a form of internationalist nationalism born of the experience of decolonization itself. Indeed, many of these early postcolonial elites realized the limitations of the nation-state to carry out development, especially as primary commodity exporters amid the vagaries of the world market. The anticolonial struggle had also fostered an appreciation of the deep connections between distant peoples against a common enemy. They thus often promoted supranational solutions, such as the West Indies Federation (1958-62), and various pan-Arabist and pan-Africanist experiments. In this vein, one may also mention efforts led by independent India to make the Commonwealth of Nations more closely integrated, with a common citizenship; or even, for the Trinidadian George Padmore, turning it into a socialist federation. The failures of such schemes led to more global proposals, premised on the same principle of interdependent sovereignties. The NIEO and associated initiatives thus envisioned a democratization of international institutions, enabling and enabled by a redistribution of resources from rich to poor countries, and regulation of global commodity trade. As Mamadou Dia, first prime minister of Senegal, put it before the UN in 1960: “world democracy will be economic and social democracy, or it will not exist at all.”
As noted earlier, the BRICS also support the democratization of global governance in certain ways, endorsing greater EMDC representation in decision-making bodies, as well as technology transfer. But, given its composition and goals, it is not the right forum to push beyond that, towards something resembling the more expansive world social democracy. Only the broad-based collective that used to be the Third World can truly rekindle the Bandung Spirit.
Towards a Global South
At its core, the confusion between BRICS and the aspirations of a larger constituency stems from the fact that this earlier “troublemaking” project was succeeded by two formations: the so-called Global South, giving continuity to the mass of countries once known as Third World (give or take a former Yugoslavia); and the rising powers, giving continuity to the agenda perceived as challenging the ruling world order. This article has argued, so far, that it is important not to subsume the former’s interests and aspirations into the latter. Now, the matter concerns this collective, developing countries, the Global South, or the Rest, and its own, blunted vision.
What happened is that this split inheritance of the Third World was chosen by its own leaders. Industrialized countries’ concerted efforts to undermine and divide their opposition, as well as the latter’s own myriad dysfunctions, prevented the NIEO from taking effect. The 1980s global debt crisis, finally, is widely acknowledged to have finished off the Third World. In 1975, the leading rich countries of the world (the US, the UK, France, West Germany, Canada, Italy and Japan) created a small summit-level club in order to better strategize against the NIEO: the G7. So, what if the Third World created its own counterpart, so that its most influential members could steer their peers, without having to navigate large and unwieldy coalitions like the NAM and G77?
Thus, the G15 was born in 1989. Around the same time, faced with their demoralizing setbacks, developing countries established the South Commission, led by Nyerere and future Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, and convened a coterie of economists and other experts from around the world. Its final report, published in 1990, lamented that “the Northern locomotive economies will not pull the train of Southern economies at a pace that will satisfy its passengers,” such that locomotives of the South would have to do the job. These major countries would focus on maximizing growth, and, in so doing, pull their poorer peers forward with them—reminiscent of Deng Xiaoping’s justification for the inequality created by Reform and Opening in China: “let some people get rich first.” The G15’s second summit in 1991 embodied the spirit of the era, being “devoid of confrontationist haranguing of the North,” while still demanding that the latter help to foster an enabling global environment for developing countries to thrive (through preferential trade policies, etc.).
But embracing the liberalizing economic ethos of the 1990s did not produce the intended locomotives, nor did the G15 become a major force to rival the G7, eventually petering out of activity. However, this project would finally find its vessel in the following decade, when the commodities boom (fueled by Chinese growth) did, in fact, propel some non-Western economies into emerging status; while the 2008 global financial crisis deeply affected and even demoralized the West. It was under these conditions that the BRICS came together and gained prominence.
It may be time to reconsider this path.
As discussed above, to the extent that the BRICS can be considered a challenger to the Western-led order, it is only in a rather limited sense, given its status as a summit club of rising powers. However, one of the major reasons for the BRICS’ assumption of this leadership role over that broader collective is the fact that the latter’s fora, the NAM and G77, have not risen to the occasion. Is there any margin for not only the “troublemaking” but also the large-scale unity seen in the 1970s?
The interesting thing is that a certain unity does persist. Quantitative analyses of UN General Assembly voting patterns, for example, show a remarkable, enduring proximity among the 134 members of the G77, across issue areas, and despite the growing economic differentiation among these countries over time. Another study analyzed 3,678 official statements in trade and environment negotiations, and found “surprising Southern unity, despite intra-South disparities in economic and political might.” While some scholars have attributed such patterns to an ambient anti-Westernism, devoid of any positive normative content, closer analysis of the actual specific policies upheld and discourses deployed to that end reveals a shared normative universe.
Indeed, these countries still defend the aforementioned basic programme of intertwined democratization and redistribution, albeit on far more moderate terms. The first element can be seen not only in their advocacy for increasing formal representation in global institutions, but also in forms of substantive democracy, such as providing financial assistance and other special allowances for the delegations of smaller, poorer countries, so that they may actually attend and meaningfully engage with crucial negotiations. The latter element is present throughout the collective discourse of developing countries in multilateral negotiations, with an insistence on the primacy of intergovernmental assistance in global development finance, rather than the private solutions favored by developed countries. This is not because developing countries are inherently developmentalist—it’s only the same old matter of sovereignty, of being able to decide for themselves how such programmes will be implemented in their own countries. This can even be observed in climate negotiations, where the G77 is notoriously divided. In fact, during the lead-up to the 2015 Paris Agreement, there were fears that the group would fully fracture. But it found enough basic common ground to still operate as one, e.g., in defense of financial/technical assistance and “common but differentiated responsibilities” for developing countries (incidentally, at the climate summit which just wrapped up in Belém, Brazil, the Climate Action Network gave its “Ray of the Day” award to the G77, for its joint defense of a Just Transition Mechanism).
Similar research on the BRICS’ voting and discursive patterns, meanwhile, does not reveal the same level of unity at the UN or elsewhere. What is most surprising, then, is that the Global South might actually have a more coherent common normative foundation than this much smaller group.
This is because its members can all be classified as rising powers, which is what brought them together in the first place, and this leads to a limited set of common interests regarding global institutions, in favor of furthering the continued rise of their power. But this is not as deep as an identity based on a shared colonial history and the resulting contradictions of sovereignty after independence; problems which cut across almost every area of global affairs and, thus, generate a more holistic set of interconnected policies in response. Beyond that, this lingering ideational coalition stems from the fact that these fundamental problems of self-determination, which motivated early postcolonial leaders and thinkers, then, are still with us, and still give shape to what is now called the Global South.
As mentioned earlier, this is a contested term, and in many ways an inferior substitute for “Third World.” Although the latter is now synonymous with “poor country,” its meaning originally denoted the political choice of non-alignment; as a result, it was able to encompass countries such as Yugoslavia and even Romania. Despite not experiencing the colonialism and decolonization process which shaped their peers’ democratizing/redistributive project, these European members still identified with its promise of substantive sovereignty through international solidarity.
This shows the potential of a coalition explicitly built on a shared political platform, rather than common geography or level of economic development. After all, it was always wrong to reduce the post-1945 so-called liberal international order to a Western project: it was, in fact, co-constituted with significant input from around the world. This is why non-Western countries feel a genuine sense of custodianship over many of its institutions (the UN General Assembly, UNCTAD, etc.). What we call the Western-led order, then, is perhaps best understood as the predominant Western take on this global system—ostensibly, a world of democracies, free trade, human rights, with some limited assistance to the poorer nations. But, since the formation of the postwar order, there have been different visions thereof, which coalesced into the Third World agenda outlined above. Of course, the West never upheld its own lofty normative platform; but the outward vision it projected was still consistent and consequential, giving a coherent telos and universalist “human face” to Western hegemony. Now, they do not even have that anymore, as the US itself is no longer interested in even putting up this human face. However, instead of leading to a multipolar world of separate and incommensurable “spheres of influence,” perhaps this moment calls for an equally universalist alternative, offering something to everyone. An updated version of the NIEO, like the original, would not be revanchist but based on an interdependent view of the world, and, by the intertwined democratization of international institutions and redistribution of resources, would benefit all countries by increasing global prosperity and stability. The same argument as that made by socialists and social democrats at the domestic level. The climate crisis has only made this argument of interdependence more relevant; it would also serve to overcome the centrality of fossil fuels to the former Third World’s visions of global change (from the 1973 Oil Shock to Hugo Chávez).
The BRICS, meanwhile, are often accused of being a straightforwardly anti-Western alliance. While its members are more divided on the matter than this would suggest (as seen with the 2025 summit’s muted statement on the US), it is still true that this group has a weaker claim on non-alignment than the historic Third World. As critics have noted, the highly prominent role of Russia within BRICS limits what the group can say about the former’s invasion of Ukraine, unlike what they can regarding Israel, for example. As mentioned above, the BRICS being a small group, with China as its most powerful member, is a plus for other participants and prospective applicants; but it is also a source of criticism, as China therefore exercises outsize influence, again undermining the group’s purported non-alignment. The NAM did not include any of the Cold War’s major belligerents, as a prerequisite for its non-alignment (China joined only after the Cold War ended). As such, an organized and broad-based formation of the Global South could more effectively claim this legacy than the BRICS, given the absence of Russia and a more diluted Chinese influence.
The former Yugoslav states and Romania, meanwhile, have all left the G77 as a requirement to apply for EU membership. A member of the South Commission and later director of the South Centre think tank, Branislav Gosovic, from Montenegro, is a reminder of a time when the Global South was a political project rather than a location or a socioeconomic category.
The BRICS cannot embody a truly broad-based challenge to the existing order; the widespread hope that it does, however, shows that there is a great potential for such a challenge to be raised. While the NAM/G77 have been unable to fill this role, they still show that there remains a latent ideational comity among the former members of the Third World. Rather than something which already exists, then, perhaps it would be best to think of the Global South as something that remains to be built.
