BRICS
Background
BRICS is an intergovernmental organization that brings together major emerging economies for regular political coordination and multilateral policy discussions. Its members are Brazil, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates, giving it a broad geographic span across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The grouping is significant because its members together account for more than a quarter of the world economy and nearly half of the global population, making BRICS an important forum for discussing international economic and political issues. It is often treated as a platform for shaping alternatives to existing global governance arrangements and for advancing cooperation among its members.
BRICS does not function as a supranational body with binding authority, but rather as an intergovernmental forum organized around annual summits and a growing network of institutions. Its members coordinate through summit meetings and related ministerial and technical processes, with several mechanisms created to support cooperation, including the New Development Bank, the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, BRICS PAY, and the BRICS Joint Statistical Publication. The bloc also maintains an extensive set of intragroup institutions and associated think tanks and dialogue formats. Russia is one of the founding members and has used BRICS as an important venue for its foreign policy and multilateral engagement, including work on financial and diplomatic coordination.
The organization’s conceptual roots are linked to discussions among emerging economies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, while the acronym BRIC was originally coined by economist Jim O’Neill and later popularized by Goldman Sachs. The first summit was held in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and South Africa joined in 2010, after which the group became BRICS. The bloc expanded further in 2024, when Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates attended their first summit as member states in Russia, and Indonesia joined officially in early 2025. BRICS has also been associated with efforts to increase the use of national currencies and reduce dependence on the U.S. dollar, and recent discussions have included coordination on international crises such as the Iran situation.
Timeline
BRICS efforts toward de-escalation and a sustainable settlement on the Iran situation were supported in the phone conversation between Sergey Lavrov and S. Jaishankar.
On the Telephone Conversation Between Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergey Lavrov and Minister of External Affairs of the Republic of India S. Jaishankar
Documents
On the Telephone Conversation Between Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergey Lavrov and Minister of External Affairs of the Republic of India S. Jaishankar
Lavrov and Indian FM Jaishankar discussed the Iran situation in a phone call, backing SCO and BRICS efforts toward de-escalation and a sustainable settlement.