Beyond Non-Alignment: Ethiopia, BRICS, and the Politics of Distributed Dependency

By Rahma Jibril

Ethiopia’s accession to BRICS on 1 January 2024 was widely interpreted as a diplomatic pivot toward a more multipolar international order. Yet this reading risks misunderstanding both the nature of BRICS and the character of sovereignty in the twenty-first century. Ethiopia’s challenge is no longer to escape dependency altogether. Rather, it is to manage competing dependencies in ways that maximize strategic autonomy.

The relevant question is no longer whether BRICS offers Ethiopia an alternative to the Western-led order, but whether Ethiopia can transform multipolarity into bargaining power before new forms of dependence become entrenched. The most plausible reading of Ethiopia’s BRICS membership is therefore not as an exercise in non-alignment but as an attempt to redistribute dependency across multiple centres of power. Sovereignty, in this context, becomes less about independence and more about leverage.

Sovereignty Through Distributed Dependency

Much contemporary analysis treats dependency as a condition to be overcome. Yet for developing states embedded in global markets, complete autonomy is largely illusory. Capital, technology, trade routes, and financial systems remain concentrated in external networks. The question is not whether dependency exists, but how it is structured.

Ethiopia’s sovereignty dilemma is fundamentally a bottleneck problem. Three constraints remain particularly significant: access to capital, access to maritime logistics, and access to foreign currency. Together, these bottlenecks shape the country’s developmental trajectory and circumscribe its policy choices.

BRICS matters because it potentially diversifies all three. China provides infrastructure finance and industrial demand. India offers investment, technology partnerships, and a balancing role within the Global South. Russia contributes geopolitical counterweight and diplomatic support in contested multilateral arenas. Gulf members bring capital and logistical connectivity. None eliminates dependency. Collectively, however, they reduce the risk that any single actor becomes indispensable. This is the logic of distributed dependency: a strategy through which states increase autonomy not by escaping external relationships, but by widening the range of actors on which they depend.

BRICS Is Not a Bloc

This reality is often obscured by portrayals of BRICS as a coherent geopolitical alternative to the Western order. In practice, BRICS increasingly resembles a bargaining arena rather than a unified bloc. The organisation now includes actors with competing strategic interests, divergent economic models, and unresolved regional disputes. China and India remain strategic competitors. Russia’s geopolitical priorities differ markedly from those of the Gulf monarchies. Ethiopia and Egypt continue to hold fundamentally different positions on Nile governance. Iran and the United Arab Emirates maintain competing visions of regional security architecture.

What emerges is not an alternative order but a marketplace of overlapping strategic projects. The significance of BRICS therefore lies less in institutional cohesion than in its capacity to provide members with additional diplomatic options.This distinction is critical for Ethiopia. Membership itself is not capital. It does not automatically resolve debt pressures, generate infrastructure finance, or guarantee market access. Rather, it creates a platform through which Ethiopia can negotiate across multiple centres of power simultaneously.

The Developmental Foundations of Sovereignty

Ethiopia’s sovereignty challenge is often framed in diplomatic terms. In reality, it is primarily developmental.The country’s economic transformation remains constrained by foreign-exchange shortages, infrastructure financing needs, debt vulnerabilities, and logistical exposure. Ethiopia’s participation in IMF-supported macroeconomic reforms and ongoing debt restructuring processes demonstrates the extent to which external financial institutions continue to shape domestic policy space.

For this reason, debates about sovereignty cannot be separated from debates about development finance. A state struggling to secure foreign currency, service external debt, or finance critical infrastructure possesses limited room for strategic manoeuvre regardless of its diplomatic posture.

The New Development Bank (NDB) therefore matters not because it offers a replacement for Bretton Woods institutions, but because it potentially broadens Ethiopia’s financing options. The same logic applies to Gulf investment, Chinese infrastructure partnerships, and emerging local-currency settlement initiatives within BRICS. The underlying logic holds sovereignty expands when no single creditor, institution, or partner possesses decisive leverage over national development.

The Horn–Red Sea Dimension

Ethiopia’s BRICS membership is regional before it is global. The country’s economic geography ensures that questions of development finance cannot be separated from questions of connectivity and maritime access. More than 95 percent of Ethiopia’s external trade continues to move through the Ethiopia–Djibouti corridor. This concentration transforms logistics into a sovereignty issue. A country whose principal commercial artery depends on external corridors remains structurally exposed to disruptions in regional security, port governance, and maritime competition. The Red Sea crisis that followed late 2023 demonstrated the vulnerability of global trade routes to geopolitical shocks. For Ethiopia, such disruptions translate directly into inflationary pressures, foreign-exchange strain, and increased import costs.

Yet BRICS enlargement has created an additional dynamic. The organisation now contains several of the principal actors shaping the Horn–Red Sea strategic environment, including Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. In effect, BRICS has partially internalized the geopolitical tensions of the wider region. This development carries important implications. Ethiopia is not simply entering BRICS. The Horn–Red Sea security architecture is entering BRICS as well.

As a result, the organisation increasingly functions as a venue where regional rivalries, connectivity projects, development priorities, and competing visions of order intersect. The significance of this shift should not be underestimated. It creates opportunities for dialogue and bargaining that extend beyond the organisation’s formal economic agenda.

The Limits of Multipolarity

There is, however, a danger in overstating the transformative potential of BRICS. Multipolarity does not automatically produce autonomy. A Chinese infrastructure loan, a Gulf investment package, an IMF programme, and an NDB credit line may all expand policy options. They may also generate new obligations, expectations, and forms of leverage. The assumption that diversification alone guarantees sovereignty is therefore misplaced. Dependency dispersed across multiple actors can still constrain national choices if it is not carefully managed.

The central challenge for Ethiopia is not attracting more partners. It is ensuring that none acquires disproportionate influence over critical sectors of the economy, strategic infrastructure, or national decision-making. In a world characterised by overlapping centres of power, strategic autonomy depends on maintaining flexibility across competing relationships.

Conclusion

Ethiopia’s BRICS membership should not be understood as a departure from dependency. It is better understood as an attempt to reorganize dependency on more favourable terms. The emerging international order offers middle powers greater room for man oeuvre, but only if they can navigate competing external relationships without becoming captive to any one of them. Ethiopia’s future influence will therefore depend less on choosing between Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Abu Dhabi, or New Delhi than on avoiding the necessity of choosing at all.

The ultimate test of Ethiopia’s BRICS era is not whether it can secure additional partners. It is whether it can prevent any partner from becoming indispensable. If that balance can be maintained, distributed dependency may become the foundation of a more resilient and autonomous Ethiopian sovereignty.

The Institute of Foreign Affairs