Israel's war on Gaza has exposed 'deep divide' within Brics, experts say

Middle East Eye

a day ago

As Brics gears up for its annual summit in Rio de Janeiro next week, the group's reluctance to mobilise against Israel's war on Gaza has left a gaping hole in its credibility as an institution purportedly meant to represent the Global South, experts and scholars have said.
The failure of Brics to take a bold stance and build consensus in addressing a perilous global climate involving multiple wars and an escalating crisis in the Middle East - including Israel's unprovoked attack on Iran, a member of Brics - illustrates the limitations of the grouping and a structural inability to pose a serious challenge to the US-led world order, the scholars said.
Since its inception in 2009, Brics has been touted as an attempt to consolidate economic cooperation as well as reform the international system to better serve the interests of developing economies.
Its success has been, at best, patchy, with the group being dogged by internal contradictions and competing member interests that have only appeared to deepen over the past decade.
Next week's summit in Rio, starting on 6 July, is already a diluted affair, with both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping expected to skip the event for reasons that perfectly encapsulate the ambivalence surrounding both the efficacy as well as the political posturing of the bloc itself.
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With Brazil a signatory to the International Criminal Court and compelled to arrest Putin, the Russian leader decided he would join the summit online rather than turn the event into a diplomatic headache that both countries would rather avoid.
Likewise, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also invited for a state visit to Brazil, the optics of the Indian premier being serenaded on the sidelines of a Brics summit reportedly prompted the Chinese leader to downgrade the importance of the gathering by sending his prime minister instead.
'If Brics' goal is seen as creating an alternative center of political and economic power, Gaza has revealed a deep divide within the organisation'
- Somdeep Sen, University of Pretoria
As a result, not much is expected to come of the summit.
"My feeling is that this summit will simply focus on keeping things chugging along, so to speak, without any major consideration or targeted language in the outcome documents focusing on the big-ticket, geopolitical issues of the day," Priyal Singh, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, told Middle East Eye.
Other observers, like Farwa Aamer, director of South Asia Initiatives at the DC-based Asia Society Policy Institute, described Xi Jinping's decision to pull out of the event as a significant and missed opportunity for Beijing and Delhi to speak face-to-face.
The absence of Xi Jinping and Putin would also mean that Modi would be the most prominent leader at the summit, which brings about its own set of challenges.
India and Brics
As one of the core members of Brics, Delhi has been foundational to the development of the collective.
It has also leveraged its decade-old position in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and now Brics, as well as its proximity to western powers through its growing economy, to stake a claim as a leader of the Global South and an interlocutor with the West.
But under Modi, India has increasingly moved closer to the US, with observers noting that Delhi has sought to clarify that it sees Brics as an economic rather than a geopolitical project.
Delhi has also been seen as insistent on both slowing the expansion of Brics as a means to halt Chinese influence over new members already within its sphere of influence and, therefore, temper what is being interpreted as a group geared to take on western hegemony.
Whereas there has been significant talk of Brics launching its own currency to replace the US dollar, India has shown it has no interest in doing so, opting instead to champion trade among Brics members via their national currencies.
But it's the question of Israel's war on Gaza and the inability of the group to provide leadership to the Global South that has showcased the weakness of the collective.
"If Brics' goal is seen as creating an alternative centre of political and economic power, Gaza has revealed a deep divide within the organisation," Somdeep Sen, a research associate at the Centre for Asian Studies in Africa at the University of Pretoria, told MEE.
Whereas South Africa has led a case of genocide at the International Court of Justice, and Brics has supported the case as a group, the only other member countries to sign on are Brazil and Egypt.
On the other end of the spectrum, Delhi has emerged as one of Israel's biggest defenders since 7 October 2023, after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel.
India has also sent weapons to Israel for its war on Gaza, including combat drones and AI weapons, construction workers to replace Palestinian workers, and has refused to endorse an arms embargo on Israel.
Delhi's role has even prompted some observers to advise Washington to consider the Brics as a partner instead of an adversary.
"Though Brics contains US rivals Russia and China, it also counts as its members Washington's partner states such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, and UAE, which have their own interests different from Moscow and Beijing," Sarang Shidor from the Quincy Institute said this week.
Shidor added that Brics could actually help "moderate" China and Russia.
But Patrick Bond, from the University of Johannesburg, says it's not just a select few countries that are closer to the US than they would actually like to admit.
He told MEE that efforts to valorise Brics as posing weighty opposition to western hegemony detract from the fact that every Brics nation, besides Iran, was economically benefiting from Israel's military-industrial complex.
Bond says that while there was a global call for an arms embargo and a halt to economic trade with Israel, Brazilian, Russian and South African companies were still exporting energy to Israel, while DJI, the Chinese state-owned company, was still selling drones to the Israeli military.
Moreover, Chinese and Indian companies were involved in the functioning of Israeli ports where weapons and resources were being received.
Structural challenges
Singh, from the ISS, says that despite the failures, Brics has managed to establish possibly the world's preeminent "mini-lateral" platform amongst countries from the Global South to coordinate a response to the western-led international order.
"For some countries, notably South Africa, Brics is also seen as a critical foreign policy component in advancing its 'South-South' agenda, which aims to develop deeper bilateral relations with countries from the Global South based on common values and shared historical experiences," Singh adds.
But Singh acknowledges that this agenda has struggled to take shape, by his estimate, because of the inclusion of new initiatives that have detracted from what he describes as the core effort of refining a common agenda towards tackling the international governance system and international financial institutions.
In other words, the problem with Brics is structural.
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Whereas the group has issued a call for a ceasefire as well as civilian protection in Gaza, where over 56,000 people have been killed, none of these collective decisions are in any way binding on individual states and therefore have had no effect on individual states' foreign policy objectives.
It is "this variance" and "competing interests" between states, Singh says, that keeps the Brics from pursuing greater institutionalisation in the form of either a permanent secretariat or legally binding summit decisions.
The contradictions and lack of collective action have left scholars like Sen with a deep sense of cynicism over Brics as a unit.
"With Russia facing global isolation, India led by a far-right government pursuing its own interests with little interest in pursuing a collective Brics vision, we can expect a severe weakening of the organisation," Sen said.
However, Singh notes that where the group does face the possibility of collapsing under the 'collective weight of its contractions,' he says that the grouping is still likely to stand and continue to have a role, even if only symbolically.
"I think its utility, at a symbolic level at the very least, cannot be understated - not just for India or South Africa - but for all five core members," Singh says.
"The grouping is essentially a vital component of each of the core members' foreign policy commitments as it relates to concepts and ideas surrounding South-South cooperation, progressive internationalism, and strategic non-alignment.
"While these are not necessarily individual common undercurrents for each of the core members, there are nonetheless elements of these that weave themselves into the international relations of all members, making Brics a particularly compelling grouping to remain committed to."
Additional research by Amber Rahman.