On 12th and 13th September 2026, leaders from 11 countries representing nearly half the world’s population and 40 per cent of the global economy gathered in India for the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi. Chaired by Indian Prime Minister Modi, marking BRICS’s 20th anniversary and India’s fourth time hosting, the summit was structured around the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” With a focus on a people-centric and humanity-first approach, India’s year-long chairship hosted over 350 meetings centred on economic growth, trade, finance, technology, and sustainable development, alongside geopolitical issues including those in West Asia and Ukraine.
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Interestingly, the summit is comprised of countries that have competing visions and geopolitical alignments. India and China, for instance, the founding members of BRICS, have had persistent border tensions, escalating most seriously in the Galwan Valley in 2020 and leading to fatalities on both sides. The UAE and Iran were present as well, both members of BRICS and who are continuing to be directly affected by the West Asian war. There are also other contentious issues around BRICS, such as ‘de-dollarization’, or reducing the reliance on the US Dollar for trade and financing, which has led BRICS to be seen as a vehicle for countering Western financial dominance.
In this context, the most interesting outcome was perhaps the summit itself: BRICS offered an institutional space where countries could communicate and hold meetings despite strategic competition. Modi held separate bilateral talks with both Xi and the Iranian President Pezeshkian on the sidelines. The adoption of the New Delhi Declaration also saw the consensus between Iran and the UAE on “exercising maximum restraint, as well as avoiding actions that could further aggravate the situation,” which is being hailed as an unambiguous victory for diplomacy. The Declaration also condemned the April 2025 Pahalgam attack (a diplomatic victory for India), criticised unilateral tariffs/sanctions without naming the US, endorsed local-currency payment interoperability (and steered clear of mentions of de-dollarization). The Declaration called for global governance reform, with India’s UNSC membership bid being backed up by both Russia and China.
The successful conduct of the BRICS summit amidst turbulent global affairs and testing rivalries prompts a closer look at what the institutional space offered by BRICS signifies for multilateralism, and whether cooperation between strategic rivals can be achieved without convergence on all issues. Bomassi and Bava argue that India’s BRICS presidency shows that states now operate across overlapping and sometimes contradictory institutions (e.g., G20, BRICS, Quad, SCO) and cooperate issue-by-issue rather than bloc-by-bloc: “even where they may disagree profoundly on questions of security or geopolitical alignment, they may still find sufficient common interest to cooperate on other issues….” This implies that issues can be decided on a case-by-case basis, without countries having to give up their positions. The Indian Express makes the case that BRICS offers room for sustaining conversations between countries that may or may not agree with one another. According to Associate Professor Elizabeth Roche, BRICS also highlights India’s convening power, especially if it could bring adversaries to the same table, hinting at potential mediation roles India could play in the future.
However, others are less optimistic, observing that the New Delhi Declaration offers little indication of how the shortcomings of the existing order—like unilateral sanctions, protectionism, and the unequal representation of developing countries in global institutions—should be dealt with. Professor Aftab Alam points out that BRICS is less an independent force shaping international politics, and more a forum where states respond to power changes and pursue converging interests. Analyst Vrinda Sahai contends that BRICS leaves much to be resolved, like the undefined membership criteria (Saudi Arabia’s unresolved status), the difficulty in achieving a consensus, and the establishment of credible financial procedures. In a similar vein, Dr Chietigj Bajpaee writes that there is little clarity on what BRICS stands for, and BRICS must move beyond vague calls and statements toward more substantive changes, if it wants to have a deeper impact on global governance.
The New Delhi Declaration, while institutionalising the consensus of the grouping, also reflects the tension in reconciling the interests of its members, evident in its carefully negotiated language. This binary is why the BRICS sustains: the summit points toward an institution that endures through ambiguity rather than genuine convergence over all issues.
This is, in effect, hedging behaviour on the part of the members. IR scholarship defines hedging through three features: a state’s insistence on not taking sides, its pursuit of deliberately opposite or contradictory measures to offset multiple risks at once, and its inclination to diversify partnerships to keep fallback positions available. Hedging is caused by uncertainty rather than the other way around. Scholar Cheng-Chwee Kuik uses India as an example to explain this: Modi met Xi in 2018 and institutionalised an informal bilateral summit just before delivering a keynote at the Shangri-La Dialogue on India’s vision of a “free, open and inclusive” Indo-Pacific. Another instance is seen in Modi’s insistence on non-alignment that kept the Quad a non-alliance partnership, even though tensions with China escalated during the Galwan clash. This pattern of simultaneously courting and distancing is what plays out at BRICS today.
This raises the question of whether multilateralism itself has become a hedging venue, with genuine progress reserved for bilateral channels instead. IR scholar Kuik’s later work on institutions offers a useful distinction here: he separates “institutional hedging,” which is impartial, inclusive, and aims to mitigate a broad range of risks, from “institutional balancing,” which is partial, exclusive, and aims to counter one specific threat. The latter is visible in China and Russia’s use of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation against perceived US pressure, while BRICS functions closer to institutional hedging: it survives by not picking sides, and not by uniting against a common adversary. That ambiguity secures room for manoeuvre, but it does not mean that no priority issues exist, or that progress doesn’t take place. The New Development Bank, for instance, had approved 141 projects worth roughly $44 billion by mid-2026, with $25 billion disbursed across infrastructure, renewable energy, and water projects. Therefore, ambiguity on contested political questions coexists in BRICS alongside concrete institutional progress on economic issues.
Perhaps then the significance of BRICS lies less in how much it has achieved and more in what its continued functioning signals: a recognition of shared global concerns without explicitly isolating any single member, and a positioning as non-Western rather than anti-Western. Some progress is better than none, and getting rival states onto the same table is worth more than leaving them with no seat at all, as when the UAE’s crown prince met Iran’s president on BRICS’s margins even as the war continues, or when Egypt and Ethiopia, both at odds over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, sit inside the same structure. This logic extends beyond BRICS itself: writing in Foreign Policy on the 2026 Iran war, analyst Amir Handjani argues that Washington cannot end the conflict alone, and Russia, China and India each bring something distinct: Russia acts as security guarantor, China as an economic alternative to US sanctions, and India as a trusted broker precisely because it maintains functioning ties with both the US-led security architecture and Iran itself. That cross-cutting position is only available to states that have spent years hedging and promoting dialogue with all sides.
Ambiguity, in today’s multilateralism, functions as a way of keeping national interests safe, and hedging is the strategy that protects that safety. There is real value, too, in the discipline of a structured institutional calendar. Kuik’s framework identifies “binding” as one of the core functions institutions serve for hedging states: the deliberate institutionalisation of engagement through regularised dialogue mechanisms to keep channels of communication open with all sides, as opposed to ad hoc or one-off meetings. Multilateral cooperation runs on “diffuse reciprocity,” implying that member states expect a rough balance of benefits over time, not from any single meeting, which is precisely why states tolerate a summit that produces modest or ambiguous outcomes. Read this way, an annual BRICS summit does not only succeed or fail on its own terms; it is the repetition and continuation itself that makes hedging legible and durable as a strategy. That logic worked in India and China’s favour at the 2026 New Delhi summit, with Xi’s visit continuing a reset in relations that has unfolded gradually across successive BRICS gatherings since Galwan.
Dr Neha Tetali (she/her) is an independent policy researcher and analyst and holds a PhD in Peace Studies from Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on Indian foreign policy, multilateralism in the Global South and feminism in global politics. Her research has been published in journals including Millennium: Journal of International Studies and Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding. She has also published with India’s World and the International Peace Institute (IPI) Global Observatory. She has presented her work at international conferences and has years of teaching experience in the politics of peace and conflict.