A man in San Francisco stands doubled over, a position taken by many users while under the influence of opioids such as fentanyl. Photo: Stephen Lam/The Chronicle/file photo.
By Prince Kapone – Aug 18, 2025
BRICS+ is contradictory, uneven, and fragile—but in its openings, the Global South carves space for sovereignty and struggle
Multipolarity Emerges from Crisis, Not Consensus
The story they sell is that “order” was built by reasoned men in sensible suits. The story we live is different. Multipolarity did not grow out of seminars or summits; it is the aftershock of five centuries of plunder, the recoil from wars and sanctions, and the refusal of the colonized to keep paying for someone else’s civilization. Its genealogy runs from the Bandung Communiqué (1955)—the first great gathering where the majority of humanity spoke in its own name—through the long detour of debt, structural adjustment, and counter-insurgency masquerading as “development.”
Bandung’s promise was simple and subversive: sovereignty, peaceful coexistence, cooperation, and a say in the world economy for those who actually make the world economy run. You can read that promise in black-and-white in the text of the communiqué, a document that still sounds radical because the same empires are still offended by the same words. Tricontinental’s recent dossier, The Bandung Spirit (2025), shows that this was not etiquette—it was a working program for decolonization from below.
The response from the imperial core was to tighten the screws. By 1975, the Trilateral Commission was diagnosing the real problem as “too much democracy,” a frank admission in The Crisis of Democracy that popular participation had to be disciplined to restore elite control. Soon after came the debt whip and structural adjustment: privatize the commons, slash public goods, open the veins to capital, call it modernization. Even the UN family’s own record describes how these adjustment programs were bolted to lending, how they demanded austerity as a price of credit, and how human-rights bodies have warned for years that such “reforms” undermine rights and social protection. The academic literature has filled in the human cost: structural adjustment correlates withweaker health systems and higher infant deaths. In other words, recolonization by spreadsheet.
Then the mask slipped. The 2008 crash—made in the metropole, exported to everyone—made a mockery of sermons about “sound finance.” UNCTAD’s Trade and Development Report (2009) and its chapter on developing countries documented how the South paid a “heavy price” for a crisis born at the center. The lesson was absorbed: if the rules are rigged to socialize Wall Street’s losses and privatize the South’s future, the South must change the rules—or leave the game.
That is the soil from which BRICS sprouted—not as utopia, but as refusal. Over time the bloc has widened into BRICS+, adding new members and partners as states seek room to breathe outside the dollar leash. The most recent wave is not rumor but record: on 1 January 2024, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE entered as full members, and in January 2025 Brazil announced Indonesia’s accession, echoed by China’s Foreign Ministry and corroborated by independent reporting. None of this makes BRICS+ socialist; it makes it useful—a contested space where the monopoly of imperial management is breaking. For a sober Global South view of what’s actually moving (and what isn’t), see the South Centre’s analysis on de-dollarization debates within BRICS.
Multipolarity is not a slogan; it is a material counter-tendency. You can watch it in the world’s infrastructure and payment pipes. Ethiopia’s sea-lifeline now runs on the electrified Addis–Djibouti railway, a concrete part of the South–South artery that planners in Washington never intended to exist. Across the continent, Africa’s cross-border payments platform is cutting hard-currency costs and chipping at dollar habit—precisely the sort of technically “boring” shift that changes political weather.
Does multipolarity guarantee emancipation? Of course not. As Tricontinental puts it in plain language, the task is to move from de-risking to genuine sovereignty, not to swap one master for several managers. But history’s hinge is audible. Bandung named the principles; neoliberalism punished those who tried to live by them; the crash exposed the hypocrisy; BRICS+ is the crack where history breathes. Our wager—grounded in the archives, in the data, and in the memory of struggle—is that this crack can be widened by organized people, not just negotiated by states.
Fault Lines and Frontiers within BRICS+
The pundits in New York and London keep describing BRICS+ as if it were a single beast, a kind of “emerging market” hydra with ten heads. That’s a convenient fiction. The reality is far more fractured: a coalition stitched together by shared antagonism to unipolar power, but riddled with distinct motives and trajectories. To see this bloc clearly, we need a cartography of its types, not as an academic exercise but as a guide to where the contradictions lie.
Start with the Sanctioned Resisters. Iran has endured four decades of economic siege, building parallel trade systems and oil-export routes despite Washington’s attempt to suffocate it. UN human rights experts call these sanctions what they are: collective punishment, weaponized hunger. Belarus, under European embargo, has responded by joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2024, deepening its Eurasian turn. These states bring to BRICS+ an intimate knowledge of survival under imperial blockade.Then come the Chokepoint States, perched on arteries of global trade. Egypt’s Suez Canal moves roughly 12% of world commerce. Ethiopia, though landlocked, is tethered to the sea through the Chinese-built Addis–Djibouti railway, a Belt and Road artery. Indonesia formally joined BRICS in January 2025, with China’s Foreign Ministry affirming its membership, and independent reporting corroborating the accession. It controls the Strait of Malacca and the flow of global nickel, the mineral of the energy transition. Nigeria, still listed as an OPEC heavyweight, is locked in the paradox of oil wealth and IMF-driven austerity. The UAE, another new entrant, sits astride Gulf shipping lanes and finance. None of these states are ideologically anti-imperialist, but each introduces leverage points that erode the monopoly of US and NATO control over circulation.Next are the Swing States of Sub-Imperialism: Brazil, India, and South Africa. Their ruling classes want autonomy from Washington but also jealously guard their regional spheres, often reproducing the very imperial logic they claim to resist. Brazil’s BRICS Policy Center and Morocco’s Policy Center for the New South underline the ambivalence: sovereignty without socialism, influence without transformation. India trades rupees with Russia while joining US naval exercises in the Indo-Pacific. Brazil’s agribusiness barons sell soy to China while aligning with the IMF on fiscal targets. South Africa plays mediator on Ukraine even as its elites deepen mining capital’s grip.Then there is the Socialist Pole-in-the-Making. China, with its Belt and Road steel arteries and vast financial reserves, and Russia, with its hydrocarbons and military deterrent, are the indispensable anchors. Without them, BRICS would be acronym soup. With them, BRICS+ becomes both a shield and a snare: a shelter for sanctioned states and a platform for sovereign maneuver, but also a bloc where capitalist logics are alive and well and in Russia dominant, though shaken by the war. Their presence is the condition of possibility—and the central contradiction—of the entire project.Finally, the Partner Orbit. In July 2025, Vietnam accepted BRICS’ invitation to join as a partner country, alongside Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, and Uzbekistan. This brought the BRICS “20” to life: ten members and ten partners, representing 56% of humanity and 44% of global GDP (PPP). Vietnam’s accession is more than a statistic. It signals the persistence of non-alignment—the “Four Nos” Hanoi proclaims: no alliances, no siding against another country, no foreign bases, no use of force. In an era when Washington seeks to turn Vietnam into a pawn against China, Hanoi instead joins a bloc that includes Beijing. That is multipolar maneuver, not capitulation. BRICS+ is not a socialist project. But Cuba’s inclusion changes the geometry. It brings not just a voice, but a vanguard: a living memory of revolution and an unbroken tradition of anti-imperial struggle. Its presence injects political clarity and historical depth into a bloc too often pulled toward elite interests and bourgeois nationalism. Cuba reminds the bloc that the Global South doesn’t just need sovereignty–it needs emancipation.
Typologies like these are not crystal balls. They are maps of a battlefield. Revolutionary rhetoric sits next to sub-imperial practice, sanctioned grit next to petro-dollars. What unites BRICS+ is not a coherent ideology but the cracks in empire’s edifice. It is in those cracks that the Global South experiments with breathing space—and where movements may yet find leverage to widen the rupture.
The Shared Terrain of Contradiction
Strip away the acronyms and summit speeches and what remains is stark: the only thing that unites BRICS+ is a common predicament. Each state arrives carrying its own scars. Decades of IMF-imposed austerity have hollowed public services, leaving debts that can never be repaid. Human rights bodies warn these adjustment programs violate basic rights, but the creditors continue to tighten the screws. The Global South’s predicament is not abstract; it is the lived experience of fragile health systems and preventable deaths, a permanent crisis manufactured in Washington and Brussels.
Sanctions are the other instrument of discipline. UN experts have repeatedly condemned unilateral sanctions as collective punishment. Iran has paid the price in blocked medicines, Cuba in strangled remittances, Russia in frozen assets. Every sanctioned state that joins BRICS+ carries both the memory and the know-how of navigating around this economic warfare—through barter, local currencies, or parallel payment systems.
Geography compounds the pressure. Egypt’s canal, Ethiopia’s railway corridor, Indonesia’s straits, Nigeria’s oil infrastructure—pipelines, terminals, and the Gulf of Guinea—these are lifelines long policed by Western capital. Now those same corridors are being repositioned under multipolar conditions, even as AFRICOM expands bases and NATO “partnerships” creep across the Global South. The battlefield is not just in parliaments or palaces but in ports, pipelines, and fiber-optic cables.
Nor should we overlook the domestic dimension: every BRICS+ state faces crises of legitimacy at home. Rising inequality in Brazil, farmer revolts in India, energy shortages in South Africa, the grinding weight of debt in Egypt and Nigeria. These are not contradictions that disappear inside multipolar banners; they are baked into the bloc. As Tricontinental reminds us, ruling classes maneuver to survive, but maneuver can produce openings for rupture when popular forces intervene.
These contradictions are not a bug, but the very compass of the present. As I have argued elsewhere, multipolar states must rely on the masses to survive, but many are led by classes that fear those same masses. They are compelled to distribute enough to maintain loyalty, but not enough to empower transformation. This tension is unstable, and under imperial siege, it can either break open into deeper sovereignty —or collapse back into dependency.
This is why BRICS+ cannot be read as an ideology, only as a terrain. It is not Bandung reborn, but it does echo Bandung’s challenge: to refuse the monopoly of imperial management. Its contradictions are its essence. The bloc is stitched together by necessity, not unity. And necessity, as Marx reminded us, is the midwife of history.
Empire’s Counterinsurgency against Multipolarity
Empire does not retreat politely; it sabotages. As BRICS+ enlarges its footprint, Washington and its allies double down on disruption. AFRICOM has extended its reach across the continent, stitching a web of bases from the Sahel to the Horn, ensuring that every port or pipeline can be surveilled or struck. In Asia, the so-called Indo-Pacific Strategy is less about “freedom of navigation” than about militarizing China’s periphery and constraining new partners like Indonesia and Vietnam. In Latin America, sanctions regimes and covert operations remain the preferred instruments of “diplomacy.”
Financial war accompanies the military one. The US Federal Reserve wields interest rates as weapons, provoking debt crises across the South and forcing austerity packages that unravel sovereignty. When Ethiopia announced in 2023 that it would default on its Eurobond, it was not a domestic failure but the predictable outcome of global monetary tightening. Every BRICS+ state faces this squeeze in some form: capital flight, currency volatility, weaponized ratings agencies.Information war is no less aggressive. The same media outlets that sold the invasion of Iraq now flood the wires with stories of “authoritarian China,” “expansionist Russia,” and “unstable BRICS.” The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center openly describes its mission as “countering disinformation,” which in practice means discrediting any Global South narrative that challenges the empire’s script. The goal is to delegitimize multipolar experiments before they consolidate.And then there is sabotage by co-optation. The dollar system is not being defended only with bombs and sanctions; it is defended by drawing “swing states” back into Washington’s orbit with promises of investment, trade deals, or security pacts. India is courted as a counterweight to China. Brazil’s elites are offered IMF approval in exchange for fiscal discipline. South Africa is cajoled with G7 invitations. The empire knows that if it can fracture the bloc from within, it can neutralize it without firing a shot.To mistake BRICS+ as an unstoppable juggernaut is to misunderstand both its fragility and the ruthlessness of its opponent. Every advance—be it a local-currency swap, a new logistics corridor, or a summit declaration—will be met with counter-moves: coups in Africa, proxy wars in West Asia, debt traps in Latin America, information blitzes everywhere. This is how hegemony behaves when cornered. The question is not whether empire will fight back; it is whether movements across the South can transform elite maneuver into popular rupture, so that sabotage turns into boomerang.
From De-Dollarization to Alternative Infrastructures
Empire’s most insidious weapon is not the aircraft carrier but the clearing house. The US dollar remains the lubricant of world trade, and Washington’s ability to freeze reserves or block transactions through SWIFT amounts to a global veto. It is no accident that nearly every BRICS+ communiqué mentions finance. South Centre’s December 2024 bulletin documents the growing drive to settle trade in local currencies, a pragmatic form of de-dollarization already practiced between India and Russia, Brazil and China, Iran and anyone willing to trade through barter or yuan. Each deal chips at the monopoly.
Institutions are being built to carry this shift. The New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai, lends in local currencies to reduce dependence on the IMF’s austerity scripts. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) enables cross-border trade in African currencies, bypassing the dollar habit that drains $5 billion annually in conversion costs. The ambition is clear: create infrastructures that allow the South to trade, invest, and build without asking permission from Washington or Brussels.Technology is a crucial front. The Addis–Djibouti railway, Jakarta–Bandung high-speed rail, and Russia–China Power of Siberia pipelines are not just infrastructure—they are arteries of multipolar life. They knit together regions in ways that bypass imperial chokepoints. Digital payments matter too: China’s CIPS clearing system, Russia’s SPFS, and India’s UPI are embryonic alternatives to SWIFT. Even “boring” systems like PAPSS represent revolutionary shifts when seen against centuries of dollar hegemony.But de-dollarization is no magic wand. Tricontinental warns that “derisking” is often just neoliberal code for hedging, not emancipation. If elites use local-currency swaps to protect profits while cutting social spending at home, nothing has changed. The risk is swapping one master’s currency for another’s while leaving the debt relations intact. Multipolarity only becomes emancipatory when financial sovereignty is paired with popular sovereignty.Still, cracks in the dollar wall are widening. When Argentina paid for Chinese imports in yuan in 2023, when Saudi Arabia signaled willingness to sell oil outside the dollar in 2024, when BRICS+ summits repeatedly float the idea of a shared currency unit, the taboo is broken. No one action will dethrone the dollar, but each new pipeline, payment system, and swap line makes it harder for Washington to flip the kill switch. Multipolarity lives not in communiqués but in these alternative infrastructures, built quietly, contested fiercely, and pointing toward a world where empire’s veto no longer rules by default.
The Digital Silk Road and the Battle for Tech Sovereignty
Multipolarity is not just fought on the ground of oil pipelines or debt swaps. Increasingly, it is waged in the invisible currents of fiber optics, satellites, and code. BRICS’ Digital Silk Road (DSR) represents one of the bloc’s most audacious projects: a deliberate attempt to build a secure and self-reliant digital ecosystem, free from Western chokeholds. Where the United States once monopolized not only finance but the internet’s backbone, BRICS now lays its own cable, launches its own satellites, and codes its own cloud.
The proposed BRICS-exclusive fiber-optic cable would directly link member states, reducing reliance on Western-controlled backbones and guarding against surveillance.Meanwhile, 5G rollouts spearheaded by Huawei in China and partners in Brazil and Russia have survived sanctions and bans, extending into the heart of Global South cities. By contrast, India excluded Chinese vendors from 5G trials and rolled out 5G with non-Chinese vendors.Russia’s GLONASS and China’s BeiDou navigation systems, once seen as redundant to US GPS, now form pillars of a multipolar satellite grid.Cybersecurity is being collectivized. The formation of a BRICS Cybersecurity Working Group signals that threat intelligence will be shared in real time, with AI-driven defenses deployed across borders. At the same time, financial sovereignty is being re-imagined: China pushes the digital yuan, while Russia and Brazil explore central bank digital currencies. A blockchain-based BRICS payment system, once dismissed as fantasy, now looks like a plausible bypass to SWIFT.But perhaps the most radical current runs through research and development. Joint ventures in semiconductors and quantum computing aim to erode one of the West’s last monopolies: control of the chip. Open-source AI collaborations, spanning sectors from health technology to smart cities, promise not only cheaper tools but also different values embedded in the code. Analysts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative emphasize that the Digital Silk Road is not just wires and servers but an attempt to shape technological standards, regulatory models, and even the narratives that flow across them. In this sense, the DSR has become a strategic infrastructure for digital and narrative autonomy in much of the Global South.
To empire, this is a nightmare scenario: a world where the South not only trades outside the dollar but also communicates, stores data, and secures networks without passing through Silicon Valley or the Pentagon’s kill switch. To movements, it is an opening. The task is to ensure these digital tools serve liberation, not simply new elites. For in the twenty-first century, sovereignty without digital sovereignty is no sovereignty at all.
Weaponizing Information, Widening the Crack
If multipolarity is a battlefield, then information is one of its sharpest weapons. Empire’s think tanks, from the Atlantic Council to Chatham House, publish daily broadsides about the “dangers” of BRICS+. Their goal is to frame the bloc as illegitimate before it even coheres. But the Global South has its own arsenal. Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, Geopolitical Economy Report, Peoples Dispatch, and dozens of other platforms are producing rigorous, accessible counter-narratives. This is not propaganda; it is survival. To see clearly is to fight effectively.
Movements have long known that “who controls the story controls the struggle.” During the Cold War, Washington used “development economics” to justify recolonization through debt. Today, it uses buzzwords like “friendshoring” and “de-risking” to mask supply-chain warfare. Vietnam’s refusal to be a pawn in this narrative war—joining BRICS+ while Washington sought to pit it against China—shows the power of narrative sovereignty. Hanoi insisted on its own voice, rooted in its “Four Nos” doctrine of non-alignment, and that act reverberated globally.And now, this is no longer the work of isolated outlets. In July 2025, more than 220 communicators from 50 countries launched the Journalists’ Alliance for Communication of the Global South in Caracas, declaring a permanent front to counter Western media dominance and defend truth as a right of the people. The final declaration was unambiguous: “Peoples have the right to the truth. To live it, to tell it and to know it.” From Venezuela’s foreign minister to South African and Chinese delegates, voices converged on the need for “informational sovereignty” and “sovereign digital tools” to break algorithmic control. In other words: a new international information order, crafted by the oppressed themselves.Weaponized information must come from below as well as above. It is not enough for ministries and presidents to issue statements; the working class, peasants, and youth must be able to read, argue, and imagine alternatives. That means research centers translating IMF jargon into plain speech, trade unions understanding how payment systems affect wages, farmers knowing how sanctions distort food prices. Every fact clarified is a bullet of clarity against the fog of empire.This is why multipolarity is both an opportunity and a responsibility. The opportunity: cracks in empire’s narrative monopoly allow alternative media and research to reach audiences hungry for truth. The responsibility: to avoid romanticizing BRICS+ as savior, and instead to insist that its contradictions be exposed and contested. The bloc is not a guarantee of emancipation—it is a site of struggle. As with the de-dollarization experiments, narrative work can turn elite maneuver into mass leverage.In the end, information is not an accessory to power; it is power. When empire loses its grip on the story, it loses its aura of inevitability. And when people believe the world can be different, they begin to make it so. This is the essence of weaponized information: not lies to mirror empire’s lies, but clarity sharpened into a weapon, wielded by those who refuse to bow to inevitability. In that sense, every essay, every dossier, every alliance of journalists like those who gathered in Caracas is part of the same insurgency—the long war of ideas that makes the short wars of liberation possible.
Conclusion: Cracks in the Wall, Roads Still to Build
BRICS+ is neither the socialist horizon nor a new Non-Aligned Movement. It is a bloc of states maneuvering within the wreckage of US unipolarity, held together less by principle than by necessity. Yet necessity matters. With twenty members and partners now representing over half of humanity and nearly half the world’s GDP, BRICS+ demonstrates that empire’s veto is no longer absolute. That crack in the wall—however messy—is itself historic.
The danger is obvious: multipolarity without movements will consolidate into a cartel of compradors, swapping dollars for yuan while keeping workers and peasants in chains. As Tricontinental reminds us, sovereignty without popular power is a shell. But the opportunity is just as clear: each new payment system, fiber-optic cable, and media alliance widens the space where people’s struggles can breathe. From the Digital Silk Road to the Voices of the New World media alliance, infrastructures of survival are being built that—if seized by movements—can be turned into infrastructures of emancipation.Empire will not let this pass uncontested. It responds with coups, sanctions, propaganda, and encirclement. But cracks spread; walls collapse. What matters now is whether workers, peasants, youth, and popular movements force BRICS+ beyond elite hedging toward genuine liberation. That requires weaponizing information, claiming digital sovereignty, and demanding that sovereignty mean not only the flag of the state but the dignity of the people.BRICS+ will not save us. But it proves that empire can be resisted, that inevitability is a lie. In the fissures of multipolarity, the possibility of rupture grows. Our task is to widen those cracks—through struggle, solidarity, and clarity—until what begins as maneuver by states becomes emancipation by peoples. The wall is broken; the road ahead is unfinished. It is ours to build.
(MRonline)
