Simmering rivalries cast a shadow over Global South solidarity
For much of 2025, the global spotlight has been firmly on the start of Donald Trump’s second US presidency. Yet recent days have seen the focus shift to China with its hosting of the largest-ever Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, followed by a major military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
Collectively, the SCO now accounts for around three-fifths of the Eurasian continent, nearly half of the world’s population, and over 20 percent of global gross domestic product. Full members are China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan; there are also wider observer nations and dialogue partners, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, and Bahrain in the Middle East.
The origins of SCO date back around two and a half decades to a much smaller group with a shared commitment to combat broader challenges of terrorism and separatism. Over time, however, the group has evolved into an economic forum, with many of the members also overlapping with the separate BRICS group.
For many years, these emerging market clubs appeared to lack momentum at successive summits. However, that perception may be changing.
In the past year, the BRICS club, for example, has doubled in size. Indonesia, the UAE, Egypt, Iran, and Ethiopia have joined long-standing members Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
The new BRICS nations bring more diversity to the club. Moreover, a wider group has also become BRICS partner countries, including Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.
A second source of enhanced appeal of membership of these emerging market clubs is their growing global footprint. In 1992, the share of global growth accounted for by G7 countries was 45.5 percent, while that of the original smaller BRICS group was 16.7 percent. Yet by 2023, these figures were dramatically different at 29.3 percent and 37.4 percent, respectively. With the expansion of BRICS in the past year, these nations now account for around 40 percent of the world economy.
Moreover, total trade between BRICS countries has now passed $1 trillion. This includes dominance of corporations headquartered in BRICS in markets such as energy resources, metals, and food.
A third area of growing attractiveness for the emerging market clubs is innovation from a non-Western perspective. One example is BRICS last year agreeing to a charter on responsible AI use. This initiative is promoting culturally sensitive AI development to help reduce Global South reliance on Western cloud providers and foundational models. Financial support is coming from the New Development Bank, which launched a $5 billion Digital Sovereignty Fund in 2025 to boost AI infrastructure.
BRICS is unevenly balanced, with China’s economic output around 50 times that of South Africa.
Andrew Hammond
For instance, China, India, and Russia are developing their own large language models. Moreover, in 2024, Brazil and China launched a joint project to build a Portuguese-Spanish LLM.
One other initiative underway to cultivate a BRICS-based compute stack. China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation and India’s Center for Development of Advanced Computing are accelerating so-called 7nm chip production, while Iran and the UAE are examples of nations investing in quantum computing and national AI entities.
Another priority is advancing the use of national currencies in trade between member states and away from dollarization. Following increased Western sanctions since 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow is particularly keen to continue to lead the push by BRICS to create alternative non-Western economic platforms that rely less on the dollar.
These include a proposal for a new payments system based on a network of commercial banks linked to each other through BRICS central banks. This would reportedly use blockchain technology to store and transfer digital tokens backed by national currencies, reducing need for dollar transactions.
However, while emerging market clubs such as SCO and BRICS may now have more “wind in their sails,” the reality is that they also face many challenges. Part of the reason for this is the growing heterogeneity of membership. Even among the original five BRICS members, for instance, there are key differences. Take the example of China’s periodic tensions with India, including over border issues.
This rivalry may be one of the reasons why Chinese President Xi Jinping failed to attend this year’s BRICS summit. While Beijing officially cited a scheduling conflict, the fact that the hosts Brazil issued a state dinner invitation to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have discouraged Xi from attending in case it gave the appearance of his being less important than his Indian counterpart.
These differences are likely to mean that, for the foreseeable future at least, BRICS will probably not decisively move beyond an increasingly institutionalized forum for emerging market cooperation. The growing size of the BRICS club, including new members such as Iran, has raised fears that the bloc could, ultimately, become a unified anti-Western alliance.
This concerns many in the West given that the five original BRICS nations alone include over 25 percent of the world’s land area and 40 percent of the world’s population. This fear is part of the reason Argentina President Javier Milei, a Trump ally, decided not to join BRICS, despite an invitation to do so.
There is also a wider economic challenge for BRICS, with vastly different performance among even original members of the club. China and India have delivered a generally robust economic performance over the past two decades, while results in Brazil, Russia, and South Africa have been disappointing. The result is that the group is unevenly balanced, with China’s economic output, for example, around 50 times that of South Africa.
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Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.
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