Today, the five member states are increasingly being taken seriously as significant players in global affairs. The bloc met for its annual leader’s summit in Johannesburg, South Africa in August, with the highlight of the fifteenth summit being the agreement to admit six new member countries: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who will officially join the group in January 2024. The expansion of BRICS to a BRICS+ format with 11 members and the adoption of guiding principles, standards, and procedures for the same has potentially made BRICS—unless they decide not to retain the name—a more attractive institution for consensus-building and dialogue in the developing world. There were some worries that expansion was largely directed by China and would seek to make the grouping more of an anti-Western forum. But most of the new members do not fit into such a description. Are they a forum of the Global South, then—except for the presence of the decidedly Northern Russia? Could the collective entity they represent prove a major force, with a host of other countries scrambling for BRICS membership? Or might the 11 countries be far too strained by their own contradictions to constitute an effective new political configuration? Furthermore, what does the expansion mean when not long ago, there were even questions about whether there was enough sustained interest within the original BRICS to stick together?
