Since the first formal BRIC(s) summit in 2009 in Yekaterinburg, world affairs have changed substantially and with them BRICS countries emerged as pivotal players on the international scene. While in the first decade of the new millennium we could observe a decline in violent conflict, this trend has been reversed. Since the Arab Spring conflict in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) has intensified, the Ukrainian crisis brought back armed confrontation to Europe and a brutal civil war erupted in South Sudan. Although it is still too early to come to any final conclusions how far the global political, economic and security order has changed and what contribution we can attribute to BRICS, it is now rather a truism than a revelation to categorize BRICS countries as emerging or rising powers. After a decade of the existence of BRICS its countries are now much more established than emerging powers. If the label BRICS stands for anything of importance it is certainly for its status-boosting effect for its members and the normalization if not general acceptance of the discourse on multi-polar global politics. How far multi-polarity reaches and what it entails is still up to debate but there are hardly many scholars who doubt that power is increasingly dispersed around various actors in contrast to its concentration in a few hands.1 While there is no consensus how exactly the global order changes, there is an implicit consensus that it does change and that BRICS members though not exclusively are key drivers of this change.
Given their geographical spread across four continents, increasing economic interdependencies, political ambitions and integration in global governance structures, the space in which BRICS interests are not affected is getting smaller and there are very few indicators for a long-term BRICS decline or disappearance. The recent economic slowdown in gross domestic product (GDP) growth and the dominance of domestic political constrains most visible in countries like Brazil and South Africa did not lead to a disintegration of the grouping. On the contrary, BRICS summit meetings are still expanding in terms of thematic working meetings. The establishment of the New Development Bank (NDB) and Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) is a visible sign of converging and even institutionalized common interests.
For a considerable time the debate around BRICS and emerging powers was concentrating on two main questions: Will BRICS be gradually integrated into Western-dominated institutions and align with mainstream discourses or will they form a bloc outside established systems and become an antipode?2 The realist paradigm framed the debate in terms of either bandwagoning or counter-balancing.3 A more nuanced picture of BRICS influence is only slowly emerging with scholars developing more sophisticated taxonomies to categorize changes in global order and influence of rising powers, but most studies oscillate between these two positions.4 However, today we can neither observe a ceding of BRICS criticism toward Western preponderance nor clearly identify a BRICS counter-hegemony. Indeed reform of global governance institutions has been sluggish to non-existent and divisions between BRICS countries remain significant and curtailing the formation of a political alliance which fully uses its newly acquired leverage. De facto BRICS remains a loosely institutionalized grouping of five countries which display significant convergence in their reformist agenda toward global governance institutions but fall short of building an alliance in the traditional sense of forming a political bloc because of diverging preferences.5 Instead of formulating dyadic assumptions about BRICS following a moderate reform or a revisionist trend,6 the book is interested in exploring BRICS positioning toward large-scale armed conflict, understanding it as an explorative research question. Exploring BRICS response to armed conflict is important because it constitutes order.
The analysis and evaluation of BRICS in global politics require a short discussion of what BRICS is, its ontology and how it can be studied. There is possibly no single answer to this question and it is often easier to identify what it is not. As such it does not easily fit under the concept of an international organization. BRICS is too loosely organized to call it an organization or institution. Neither does it have a foundational treaty, nor is there a secretariat which oversees policy implementation. Its physical and political existence concentrates very much on annual meetings and declarations reaching from summits of heads of states to numerous issue-specific specialized working groups and fora. For 2018 the official calendar of events listed 117 meetings throughout the year.7 The recent establishment of the NDB and CRA is one of the most important examples of institutionalization but is rather the exception, only covering a small part of BRICS activities.
Could BRICS be an international regime instead? Regimes are less organized and institutionalized in terms of legalization, stratification and hierarchy. Krasnerās classical definition of a regime refers to converging principles, rules, norms and decision-making.8 Regimes have minimal actorness (in comparison to organizations) but display governing qualities. To some extent this better corresponds to BRICS nature which does formulate policy aspirations at an increasing level but does not endeavor to set up an implementation and supervision machinery which could curtail national sovereignty. However, even this softer form of organization does not fully resemble the BRICS example. Until today BRICS is no regulatory entity which explicitly produces international norms or rules. While its many summit declarations do formulate certain principles for international order and are akin to policy programs, it does not declare them in the form of obligations but rather formulates them as expectations. In any case, the main character of BRICS is not rule or decision-making; in this regard it is no international regime. However, the formulation of common positions in the BRICS format might be translated into action (operational or regulatory) in other international organizations at a later stage. At least BRICS countries have an information advantage when similar issues are discussed at international level following BRICS coordination before. However, it is still unclear if BRICS is systematically and instrumentally used as a strategic tool to influence decision- and rule-making elsewhere.
The remaining terminology and conceptualization of international relation ontologies speaking to the BRICS character are somehow less precise and academically unsatisfying. The literature when referring to BRICS often uses terms like āgrouping,ā āforum,ā āvenue,ā āassociationā or āformation.ā While āgroupingā is the most proliferated term it is missing a reliable definition. What we often get instead is a mere description of the activities. The strong emphasis on classical state sovereignty in BRICS documents implies that the term āgroupingā refers to actorness, understood as independent decision-making and subsequent action taking, as primarily resting on the constitutive parts of the group which are the member states. In this vein a group exists predominately because it can be compartmentalized and disentangled into its constitutive parts. Members do not delegate powers to the group as in the case of international organizations or regimes. The group activities are not equilibrium outcomes which rational choice institutionalism has conceptualized as principal-agent relationship; they are much more direct expressions of foreign policy priorities. While rational choice institutionalism assumes control over organizations by its members, control is conditioned on equilibrium outcomes which require giving up some priorities to the benefit of the collective gain.9 This we would not assume to happen in a grouping such as BRICS in which consensus decision finding is the principle.
Much of the criticism against BRICS highlights the internal divisions, asymmetries and even economic and security competition that exist between members of the group which are very practically hampering convergence between these five countries and as a consequence undercut the influence BRICS have in international affairs.10 However, this criticism while correct in its empirical analysis fails to recognize the basic value of a foreign policy grouping. Indeed as Nikolas Gvosdev finds: āOne of the advantages of the BRICS process is that it remains a loose association of states with somewhat disparate interests, so no effort is made to force a common position when the BRICS states cannot agree on one. But these states have also found a way to disagree on some key issues ā¦ without torpedoing the entire enterprise.ā11 In other words, the main intention and value of BRICS is not to become an effective governance organization but to gather foreign policy clout in global affairs in situations in which BRICS key preferences are at stake.
With regard to foreign and security issues in contrast to purely technical questions of cooperation one s...