The 2024 BRICS summit in Kazan solidified an anti-liberal «counter-order,» challenging the rules-based international system. With its expansion to 23 members, the bloc, financially led by China, seeks to evade global restrictions and advance its agendas, though it faces coordination challenges and diverse objectives among its members.
The October 2024 BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, in which the body expanded its membership from 10 to 23, is the most concrete expression of an emerging, if nebulous illiberal resistance to the rules-based international order that has created the basis for international economic and technological progress and democracy since the second World War.
Behind their rhetoric about alternative models for democracy and development, the regimes comprising the expanded BRICS and the global “counter-order” more broadly, are diverse in their objectives, united principally by the desire to escape from the constraints that legacy multilateral political, economic, and military institutions have imposed on their actions. These include contractual and constitutional commitments, accountability to the will of their own people, and in some cases, institutionalized involvement in criminal activities.
Background image of Meeting between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at 2024 BRICS Summit from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_BRICS_summit#/media/File:Meeting_between_Xi_Jinping_and_Vladimir_Putin_at_2024_BRICS_Summit.jpg)