I still don’t understand what “BRICS” is supposed to mean. I do know what the acronym refers to, but that isn’t an explanation.
About 25 years ago, some guy at Goldman Sachs identified 4 developing nations as likely to collectively take over the world economy in the future. Brazil, Russia, India and China. BRIC. A decade later, those four countries decided that was actually a pretty cool idea and started unironically having summits where they got together and talked about their plans for economic development. Shortly thereafter, South Africa begged to join the cool kids club, so it became BRICS.
Since then, they've had annual BRICS meetings, but nothing much has come of it and most people had never even heard of this. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has polarized global alliances though, with India and China both openly taking Russia's side while Brazil and South Africa have both said that Ukraine should just surrender and let Russia have whatever it wants (but have not, to my knowledge, supplied Russia or propagandized to their populations on its behalf). That's led Russia/India/China to more aggressively pursue this idea of an anti-Western economic bloc to rival the G7 (which used to be the G8 until Russia was kicked out after taking Crimea). Of course neither BRICS nor the G8 is really an "economic bloc" in the same way as the EU or the Warsaw Pact, but they are nations that are openly saying that their priorities are at least somewhat aligned, and it's fair to say that this is an ambition for Russia/India/China.
The upshot of this is that many other nations that don't like the west have recently asked to join the anti-West cool kids club and get a seat at the table in what's looking to be a set of countries that may increasingly divorce themselves from western markets. Last month, BRICS formally invited Saudi Arabia, Iran, UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina to join. And several other nations from Africa, South America and Southeast Asia have expressed interest. So that expansion has got people talking because it's certainly "doing something." It's unlikely to actually amount to much -- two pairs of those newly-added nations (Saudi Arabia / Iran, Egypt / Ethiopia) are on the verge of war with each other, and they are all much poorer than Russia/China/India (unlike the G7, which is the other 7 of the world's top 10 countries by GDP). But the
idea of some grand alliance of "global south" countries led by China to challenge the western world order is certainly interesting to
speculate about.
