briCs+, and Changing Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century
briCs+, and Changing Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century [1] Ravi Arvind Palat June 2, 2026 [T]he day when the cosy club of the rich—the United States, the strongest economies of Western Europe, and Japan—sets the pace for the rest of the world, passing out instructions and assigning grades, is fast drawing to a close (French 2005) . In 2023, two Bloomberg correspondents wondered how the “BRICS group of emergent market nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—has gone from a slogan dreamt up at an investment bank two decades ago to a real-world club that controls a multilateral lender” when the group was about to add four new members (Hancock & Cohen 2023) . This was astonishing because when Jim O’Neill (2001) of Goldman Sachs coined the acronym BRIC—South Africa was not in the original formulation—his purpose was to advocate the inclusion of these large economies, particularly China and India, in the management of g...