BRICS Without Consensus: Can Selective Cooperation Hold Blocs Together?

India is preparing to host the 18th BRICS summit on September 12–13, 2026, under the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation, and Sustainability." With the group’s expansion in 2024, incorporating the UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Iran, and Indonesia’s official accession as a full member in 2025, alongside the addition of numerous new partner nations, the diversity of member perspectives regarding issues such as the Middle East, relations with the United States, and the Russia-Ukraine war has grown. Consequently, issue-specific, pragmatic cooperation is emerging as a prominent operational model for the group, moving away from the comprehensive political consensus typical of traditional international and intergovernmental organizations.

Members can now cooperate where their interests align while maintaining divergent stances elsewhere. This suggests that BRICS may be consolidating an alliance-building model that relies less on shared political positions and more on mutual benefit and selective cooperation. This trend is likely to intensify and spread to other cooperative groupings, particularly as political differences persist. Thus, a fundamental question is raised: Can international alliances remain effective in the absence of political consensus, or has selective cooperation become the new foundation for collective action?

In 2024, the BRICS group expanded to include members with divergent priorities. The group now faces growing difficulty reaching consensus when geopolitical conflicts directly affect members’ national interests. The strategic rivalry between China and India stands out as a primary point of tension; despite their cooperation within the bloc on issues such as development and trade, they remain strategic competitors, notably given their unresolved border dispute in the Himalayas. Furthermore, India’s participation in the Quad alliance, alongside the United States, Japan, and Australia, is perceived by Beijing as an effort to counterbalance its regional influence. A second source of divergence has emerged among the new members from the Middle East, as the Iran war has threatened the regional and economic security priorities for the region’s member states in BRICS. These differences become particularly critical when Middle East conflicts directly impact the vital interests of some BRICS members.

Consequently, the challenge facing the bloc is no longer limited to managing divergent economic priorities; it now extends to sustaining cooperation among nations whose security, regional interests, and threat perceptions may be in direct conflict. Under such circumstance, the focus has shifted from whether BRICS, or any international cooperation bloc, can maintain its unity to whether it can function effectively in the absence of such collective political consensus.

The transition from the phase of institutional consolidation to the anticipated “stress test” of 2026 reflects a fundamental shift in the functioning environment of BRICS. Between 2015 and 2022, the bloc focused on strengthening its institutional architecture, expanding cooperation mechanisms, and reinforcing consensus-based coordination. However, the bloc’s rapid expansion from 2023 to 2025 brought in nations with more diverse geopolitical alignments and security priorities. As a result, BRICS faces a “stress test” during the upcoming summit to determine whether an increasingly diverse bloc can sustain cooperation amidst the difficulty of reaching political consensus.

While the bloc’s expansion has undoubtedly bolstered its economic and geopolitical weight, the diversity of its members and their differing priorities have made achieving political consensus extremely difficult. This has raised expectations that the group’s ability to adopt collective stances on global issues will diminish, a trend that was anticipated, in turn, to affect its capacity to make decisions regarding the economic development that originally drove its formation.

Indeed, economic development was the group’s primary objective at its formation, whereas geopolitical and security issues were of secondary importance. Consequently, the current fluctuations in dynamics have sparked concerns regarding the group’s operations and similar cooperative blocs in general, specifically regarding the ability to reach a consensus when an outside state is involved, compared to the difficulty of achieving that same consensus when a member state is a party to the issue.

Between May 14 and 15, 2026, BRICS foreign ministers met in Delhi, India, in preparation for the leaders’ summit. More than 15 sectoral and technical meetings resulted in the issuance of joint declarations or statements. It was noteworthy that trade ministers adopted a joint declaration, and cooperation continued in the finance and central banking sectors, whereas the two key foreign policy meetings failed to produce a joint statement. Cooperation proves successful and effective when members’ economic interests, such as trade, finance, agriculture, health, and disaster management, overlap; however, it weakens when geopolitical interests directly clash and strategic alignments diverge.

As a result, leaders in New Delhi are expected to discuss ways to deepen cooperation among the group’s members regarding shared priorities, as well as to exchange views on regional and global developments of mutual interest. The underlying message suggests that member states appear to have placed particular emphasis on focusing on common issues to develop concrete projects while merely discussing global political issues to avoid undermining the bloc’s cohesion due to foreign policy disagreements.

The leaders’ determination to uphold the bloc’s core principles is reflected in the presence of over 500 institutional investors, finance ministers, and business leaders. The primary focus appears to be on strengthening institutional capabilities amidst economic and energy challenges through infrastructure, energy, and digital projects.

This raises questions regarding the group’s capacity to build upon and selectively address key priorities, as anticipated at the upcoming summit, and the role of selective cooperation as a means of managing these divergences.

Returning to the original purpose of establishing BRICS, the focus lies on advocating for a greater role in international bodies that shape economic decisions and on coordinating economic policies. Key priorities include promoting foreign direct investment, viewed as a cornerstone of economic sovereignty, infrastructure growth, and supply chain resilience, as well as advocating for de-dollarization, increasing trade in local currencies, and creating an alternative financial system that accounts for the realities of financial frameworks across the Global South and fosters cooperation among them.

These objectives are increasingly translating into practical financial mechanisms, for instance BRICS have focused on improving digital cross-border payments through initiatives like “BRICS Pay”, which seeks to facilitate B2B and C2B payments in local currencies. Furthermore, India has proposed including the integration of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) across BRICS countries on the bloc’s agenda for the 2026 summit, aiming to make cross-border payments faster and less dependent on traditional banking channels.

These primary economic functions demonstrate that “selective cooperation” has been the operating model since the bloc’s formation and subsequent expansion. While increasing entanglement in geopolitical issues has occasionally caused fluctuations in the bloc’s decision-making, it has consistently reverted to its original operational mechanisms.

Selective cooperation that has long been the core of BRICS, stemming from the absence of a unified political agenda among its members. However, as the group expanded to include members with diverse backgrounds, the integration of varying foreign policy stances created challenges, at times resulting in a deadlock regarding the issuance of joint political statements. Yet, this impasse may prove temporary, given the group’s fundamental reliance on economic and trade cooperation, underscoring the fact that BRICS is not, in essence, a geopolitical alliance. It is a diplomatic space where states coordinate selectively, hedge against uncertainty, and bolster their influence without committing to a single strategic agenda.

This is sustained by the 2025 Rio Declaration that explicitly acknowledged that the group’s growing membership and expanding thematic agenda necessitate adjustments to BRICS’ working methods. The expansion of membership has significantly highlighted the strategy of selective cooperation, making it central to the group’s future institutional model, a trend likely to be reinforced in other international cooperative frameworks facing, or expected to face, similar challenges.

Looking ahead to the upcoming meeting, India is already practicing selective management; it frames its presidency as an effort to manage, rather than eliminate, divergence. In other words, while a comprehensive political consensus may be hard, effective cooperation persists. Rather than allowing disagreements to hinder all BRICS activities, India continues to facilitate discussions via the “Sherpa” channel; a method relying on appointed experts and officials who negotiate and plan behind the scenes to level out difficulties and pave the way in advance for leaders to seamlessly achieve their ultimate objectives while addressing distinct issues such as ceasefires, energy security, maritime security, and trade disruptions.

Amid growing geopolitical divergence globally, BRICS appears to be laying the groundwork for a new approach to future international cooperation: shifting from political cohesion based on consensus toward practical, issue-based cooperation. In other words, a group does not require comprehensive political agreement to sustain cooperation in other vital areas.

This trend points to the emergence of a more flexible form of alliance-building, where members cooperate in areas of shared interest while setting aside their differences in areas where they diverge. This leads us to further questions regarding the effectiveness of selective cooperation as a suitable benchmark for measuring the effectiveness of international cooperation trajectories.

BRICS+ is expected to redefine the very concept of cohesion; rather than requiring political agreement through comprehensive consensus, cohesion may increasingly come to mean maintaining cooperation in areas of shared interest while containing disagreements in others. International cooperation models are likely to evolve toward the formation of flexible, issue-specific alliances, moving away from the traditional bloc unity.

A “new model of alliance-building” may emerge in the future, wherein flexible institutionalization, rather than a unified alliance, plays a pivotal role in areas of evolving collective interest, such as financial integration, energy policy coordination, the protection of maritime logistics routes, cooperation in AI and cybersecurity, and the coordination of food security efforts.

The success of selective cooperation pivots on institutionalizing this approach by adopting an issue-specific alliance structure and explicitly acknowledging differences of opinion, rather than pretending consensus. To institutionalize selective cooperation and build flexible alliances, the crucial step lies in transitioning from an informal practice, characterized by “cooperation where interests align”, to an established decision-making structure. This could potentially happen through several mechanisms.

First, issue-based coalitions where members are able to form temporary or permanent coalitions around specific issues without linking it with the consensus around geopolitical issues. Second, optional participation in which blocs establish a formal principle allowing members to participate in initiatives based on their interests and capabilities, rather than treating every initiative as a collective obligation. Third, formal acknowledgment of disagreements where a rule is adopted that does not require members to reach a consensus on issues falling outside the scope of specific cooperation; this prevents geopolitical disputes from hindering collaborative efforts in trade, development, technology, or finance.

This is particularly relevant given that others face the same challenge of divergent political preferences. For instance, some NATO countries, including Spain, the UK, Germany, France, and Finland, have reportedly refused to grant access, base usage rights, or airspace clearance for U.S. military operations. Similarly, within the European Union, Hungary has repeatedly obstructed or delayed EU sanctions packages against Russia. Countries appear increasingly divided regarding foreign policy actions, influenced by various factors such as the depth of their partnerships with other countries. Consequently, issue-based alliances appear to be a potentially applicable choice. Such blocs could develop a flexible model capable of withstanding political disagreements, rather than fracturing due to an inability to act collectively on foreign policy matters.

The future of blocs like BRICS may lie not in achieving greater political unity, but in building institutions capable of managing political division. In the contemporary political landscape, the formation of pragmatic, issue-specific alliances represent the most plausible form of future international cooperation; increasingly complex events necessitate flexible alliances that focus on specific issues. While these blocs can cooperate selectively on specific projects, such cooperation faces limitations if political divisions reach the levels that prevent members from providing capital, implementing decisions, or coordinating policies. For instance, selective cooperation is effective as long as it doesn’t hinder the New Development Bank (NDB), formerly known as the BRICS Development Bank and established to finance projects, potential to foster economic cooperation and overcome obstacles arising from a lack of political consensus.

In conclusion, while this new model holds significant potential for ensuring the functional sustainability of future blocs, it reveals a specific vulnerability: cooperation peaks when interests can be separated, yet becomes increasingly difficult when it imposes tangible geopolitical or material costs on member states. Consequently, some members may hesitate to deepen cooperation if the economic costs are directly linked to a geopolitical situation that lacks consensus within the bloc. In this context, international cooperation mechanisms may need to learn how to operate within the constraints of consensus-building.

From this perspective, future alliances may require a certain degree of political unity to maintain institutional effectiveness in areas of vital importance to its members. As such, determining the degree or level of political unity poses an additional challenge, particularly as the pace of geopolitical events often evolve rapidly than the capacity of bloc members to establish standards governing the limits of such unity. Hence, the best practice identified to date may likely involve mechanisms that allow for the categorization and prioritization of points of disagreement while balancing required levels of political unity with a proactive approach to geopolitical events that impose severe costs on members. This necessitates distinguishing between disputes that impede cooperation and those that members can overlook or manage while continuing to develop cooperation within the bloc.

This principle mirrors the European Union’s experience with “differentiated integration”, including multi-speed and variable geometry arrangements, where core members can advance financial integration while others opt-out without vetoing the initiative. Applying this model to BRICS, for instance, could allow members to deepen cooperation in areas of mutual interest without requiring the simultaneous participation or consent of all members. Also, institutionalising “opt-out clauses” for joint political statements could likely prevent deadlocks like the one seen in the May 2026 foreign ministers’ meetings.

Consequently, the true test lies in the extent to which such selective cooperation is sufficient to achieve tangible collective results. A failure to agree on the political interpretation of a crisis does not necessarily hinder cooperation among members in addressing its practical repercussions on them; they can still reach a consensus on necessary measures, such as developing alternative payment systems, boosting bilateral trade, and implementing joint development projects.