BRICS: A New Bandung Spirit?

At the 17th BRICS summit in July 2025, the presidents of Indonesia, Prabowo Subianto, and Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, invoked the “spirit of Bandung” — the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, where 29 newly independent countries proclaimed their commitment to anticolonialism and peaceful coexistence. Lula went further, asserting that “BRICS is the heir to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)”, the grouping created in 1961 to represent countries seeking a path apart from the two Cold War superpowers. As scholars such as Robert Vitalis have shown, the idea of a coherent “spirit” inaugurated at Bandung is a retroactive construction. Nonetheless, the “spirit of Bandung” has come to embody the period during the 1960s and 70s when the collective global political ambition of what was then known as the Third World was at its peak.

From its first formal summit in 2009, the BRIC group — initially comprising Brazil, Russia, India, and China, before the addition of South Africa two years later and its renaming as BRICS has openly sought to challenge Western dominance, particularly at international organisations. Today, the organisation numbers 11 full members and has become the most significant non-Western coalition pushing to reform the global order since what Randolph Persaud called “the end of the Bandung spirit”, a shift resulting from the debt crises of the 1980s, structural adjustment, and a post–Cold War environment less favourable to non-alignment.

What is new is the extent to which BRICS has recently embraced this inheritance. Its 2023 summit was the first to use the expression “Global South” in a joint declaration, vowing to “further integrate the voice” of the Global South within the G20. Until then, its stated aim had been limited to “serving common interests of emerging market economies and developing countries”, chiefly by making international institutions more representative. By the time of the 2025 declaration — titled “Strengthening Global South Cooperation for a More Inclusive and Sustainable Governance” — this had morphed into playing “a pivotal role in voicing the concerns and priorities of the Global South” in a general sense. This greater discursive ambition has coincided with a significant expansion in BRICS membership since 2023.

Yet these parallels can only be taken so far. BRICS remains a small group: the five countries in the acronym have been joined by six new full members (Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE), and ten partner countries with no decision-making power (Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam). This is far from the NAM’s 86 members during its heyday 50 years ago, when it represented almost every postcolonial state of the time (NAM membership stands at 120 today). An even larger group, founded in 1964 during that same zenith of Third World activism, is the Group of 77 (G77), today representing 134 countries. Unlike BRICS, neither operates with a tiered membership structure.

Even in its expanded form, BRICS is not broadly representative of the Global South. By claiming to be, it risks appearing as a self-appointed vanguard. Thus, even in its expanded form, BRICS is not broadly representative of the Global South. By claiming to be, it risks appearing as a self-appointed vanguard. This compounds a conceptual confusion that has grown in recent decades: the “Global South” is the heir to the Third World in terms of membership; but it is the “rising powers” that have inherited the Third World’s mantle as a challenger bloc to the prevailing global order. This divergence can be understood in large part as a result of the aforementioned “end of the Bandung spirit”. Grappling with this, the NAM-mandated South Commission in 1990 pinned its hopes on a few major developing economies acting as “locomotives of the South”. However, from there, it is only a small step to claims of a more overt political leadership.

This distinction matters because, despite its eventual failure, the erstwhile Third World’s more broad-based organisations pursued more broad-based visions and policies: from the G77 negotiating preferential trade schemes benefiting its entire membership to the NAM coordinating a diplomatic campaign against apartheid South Africa. Their strength derived not from the economic heft of a few leading members, but from the sheer numbers that they could muster across international fora. The New International Economic Order that they proposed in 1974 — involving significant regulation of global markets and North-to-South redistribution — may have foundered, but it represented a more ambitious project than anything BRICS has put forward to date.

On the other hand, while the NAM and G77 have lost their former prominence, BRICS’ advantage may lie precisely in being a select club with a narrower scope. It offers a set of global public goods, such as an alternative source of development finance (the New Development Bank), an IMF-like emergency foreign currency pool (the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement), as well as a much discussed but still embryonic joint payment system that would circumvent the US dollar. All of these help to hedge against overreliance on Western-led mechanisms — this, scholars have long argued, is the group’s main appeal.

Membership also brings broader benefits: it helps members counteract diplomatic isolation, gain prestige, and develop commercial, technological, and even military cooperation, particularly with China. Armed conflict among members is, unfortunately, something the NAM and other Third World coalitions also failed to prevent; whether BRICS can endure in spite of such tensions will be a major test of its appeal. For one thing, the fact that much of the world’s current turbulence is driven by the increasingly erratic United States may spur ever more hedging against Western-centric structures.

Today’s BRICS is fundamentally different from the project that grew out of Bandung; it may even be said to be a symptom of the latter’s demise Nonetheless, today’s BRICS is fundamentally different from the project that grew out of Bandung; it may even be said to be a symptom of the latter’s demise. If the Global South is once again to assert a collective will on the global stage, it will have to do so through a more representative formation rather than a small, narrowly focused group led by major powers. However, the very fact that BRICS invites comparisons with Bandung is a sign that, in this changing world, there may yet be an opportunity to rekindle that spirit.