The Quest for BRICS Continuity
After the BRICS summit in September of 2026 the emphasis placed by India’s chairmanship on ensuring greater continuity in the bloc’s initiatives from one presidency to the other appears to have been broadly supported by observers and experts from across the Global South. The BRICS Continuity Mechanism advanced by Prime Minister Modi is predicated on a combination of a BRICS Troika mechanism (past, current and future presidency) as well as a secure digital repository to track decisions. The main rationale behind this proposal was the significant rise in the number of the BRICS core members, with further expansion put on hold due to the need to ensure greater integration of new members. A look, however, at the potential scenarios of the upcoming succession of BRICS presidencies suggests that there may be far more to the need for the BRICS Continuity Mechanism than readily meets the eye.
On the surface, the expansion in BRICS membership increases the urgency of continuity mechanisms in order to bring new members up to speed on the workings of the grouping and the various coordination mechanisms and procedures used in its operation. Another factor in this respect is that the duration of the policy cycles after the bloc’s expansion effectively increases nearly two-fold – if in the past China’s policy impulses such as the BRICS+ format took 5 years to make the full-circle before its re-launching in 2022, this policy lag now expands to 10 years, which raises the need for both greater ambition (strength of the initial policy impulse) as well as greater continuity and policy coordination in driving this policy impulse to the next BRICS cycle.
That in itself seems to be sufficient to warrant a full-fledged continuity mechanism to be instituted by BRICS, but there is more if one looks at the potential turns of how the core members’ chairmanships may follow each other. In particular, if the sequence of BRICS-5 presidencies ends in 2028 with South Africa and the next five presidencies come from the new members of the group’s core in alphabetical order, then a number of important continuity considerations arise. Firstly, the 2028 South African presidency will open a 3-year continuous presidential terms for 3 African members of the BRICS core – South Africa in 2028, Egypt in 2029 and Ethiopia in 2030. Furthermore, throughout the 2026-2033 period, the transition of annual presidencies will cover virtually all intra-BRICS bilateral relationships in need of extra care and development – this concerns the India-China relationship (passing the presidency from 2026 to 2027); the Egypt-Ethiopia relationship and the broader intra-Africa South Africa-Egypt-Ethiopia relationship (presidencies transferred in 2028-2030) and the Iran-UAE relationship (2032-2033).
Given these challenges and rising exigencies associated with policy continuity within BRICS, there may be a need to leverage additional tools and mechanisms that would sustain policy impulses from year to year. One such additional factor apart from the Troika mechanism and the secure digital repository may be the greater involvement of the regional integration arrangements in which BRICS economies are members. This may be particularly instrumental in ensuring greater cooperation and coherence among Africa’s BRICS members in 2028-2030 – the role of the African Union in working together with the three African economies, particularly in 2029, when a full-fledged BRICS African Troika composed of South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia is expected to take over, may prove to be particularly important.
Leveraging regionalism in reinforcing policy continuity needs to go beyond the expansion in the number of regional blocs participating in the BRICS+ summits. In this respect, a BRICS+ platform for regional arrangements would engender more connectivity across the main regions of the Global South, including in the coordination of individual country chairmanship successions. Together with the greater involvement of regional blocs and regional organizations, the BRICS Troika mechanism will create more scope for network effects and stronger bilateral/trilateral ties across the expanding BRICS bloc. Such a framework will in turn be conducive to a more flexible and dynamic BRICS formation, in which plurilateral accords are increasingly driving the initiatives and cooperative impulses across the entire BRICS+ platform.
In the end, the need for greater continuity in BRICS policies calls for a further expansion in the array of continuity instruments to include a greater role for regional blocs from the Global South in the BRICS+ decision-making/consensus-building. India’s presidency has delivered the necessary impulses of greater regional involvement during the past 2026 summit, with several regional integration blocs invited to participate in the BRICS+ summit. The challenge going forward will be to integrate the instrument of regionalism into the process of BRICS policy coordination, with the creation of a platform for regional blocs/regional organizations of the Global South becoming one of the key imperatives of the near-term evolution of the bloc.
Yaroslav Lissovolik is Founder of BRICS+ Analytics.