Beyond Borders #1: What the BRICS Summit in My Own Backyard Actually Means
This week, I didn't have to read about a major summit happening somewhere far away. It happened about twenty minutes from where I do my homework.
The 18th BRICS Summit ran September 12–13 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, with India holding the chairship for the fourth time since the grouping started.
Watching the coverage, then watching my dad's WhatsApp forwards about traffic diversions on the same roads I take to school, was a strange way to be reminded that "international relations" isn't actually a subject that lives in a textbook.
It's a thing that closes down 35 roads in your own city for a weekend.
Here's what actually happened, stripped of the press-release language. BRICS now has eleven members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
That's a genuinely strange group to get into a room and agree on anything, because several of those countries are on opposite sides of serious regional conflicts, especially in West Asia.
And yet on the first day, they unanimously adopted something called the New Delhi Declaration. Unanimous. Eleven countries, several of whom do not trust each other on much else.
I kept coming back to one line in the coverage: the declaration went ahead "overcoming sharp differences among member states on the West Asia conflict... following days of intensive negotiations." That sentence is doing a lot of work.
It's the diplomatic equivalent of a group project where half the group can't agree on anything, and somehow a final document gets submitted anyway. Except the stakes here aren't a grade.
They're things like trade rules, energy security, and how loudly the world's biggest emerging economies are willing to ask for a seat at the table that currently belongs mostly to the US, the UK, France, Russia, and China at the UN Security Council.
Which is actually the part I found most interesting.
The declaration backs greater representation of developing countries in global institutions, and specifically, China and Russia are now supporting India and Brazil playing a bigger role in the UN Security Council.
If you've ever done Model UN, or debate, or basically any assignment that made you learn how the UNSC works, you know how big a deal permanent-member status actually is. Getting two rival powers to publicly back your bid for it, even loosely, is not nothing.
There was also a line about counterterrorism that condemned "terrorism in all its forms and manifestations" and referenced the Pahalgam attack from last year directly.
That's India getting something concrete out of hosting — a shared statement, signed by countries that don't always agree with India's framing of security issues in the region, naming an attack that happened on Indian soil.
Diplomacy is a lot of theatre, but this is one of the moments where the theatre produces an actual outcome you can point to.
And then there's the theme itself: "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability." I'll admit summit themes usually sound like something generated to satisfy everyone and offend no one.
But underneath the slogan, the actual agenda items were specific: local-currency trade settlement (so members can trade with each other without routing everything through the US dollar), AI cooperation, energy security, and a new "Continuity and Implementation Mechanism" that Modi proposed so BRICS initiatives don't just evaporate every time the chairship changes hands to a new country next year.
That last point is the one that made me think the most, honestly, because it's a very unglamorous, structural kind of diplomacy. Not a big speech. A mechanism. A committee.
The kind of thing that determines whether an agreement is real or just a nice paragraph everyone forgets about in eleven months.
A lot of what actually holds international cooperation together is exactly this — boring-sounding infrastructure that nobody puts in a headline.
I don't think BRICS is going to replace the G7 or rewrite the entire global order by next year. I'm skeptical of both the people who say BRICS is meaningless and the people who say it's about to flip the world order overnight.
What I do think is that watching eleven countries with real disagreements produce a unanimous document, in a building I could have visited on a school trip, is the clearest lesson I've gotten all year in what "multilateralism" actually requires: not agreement, but a structure sturdy enough to hold disagreement without collapsing.
Questions to Think About
Is a unanimous declaration among eleven countries with real disagreements a sign of genuine cooperation, or a sign that the document was written vague enough for everyone to sign?
China and Russia backing India and Brazil for permanent UNSC seats costs them very little right now — what would it actually cost them to follow through, and does that change how much the gesture is worth?
If "boring" mechanisms like the Continuity and Implementation Mechanism are what make agreements stick, why do they get so little media coverage compared to the speeches?
Where This Fits Into Beyond Borders
This is the first post in a new weekly series I'm starting on Daughters of India — a place to think through international relations, diplomacy, and public policy out loud, the way I've been doing with financial literacy in the Global Teen Financial Socialization Project.
I'm not writing this as an expert. I'm writing it as someone who wants to study this seriously, in a country going through the process of arguing about its place in the world, in real time, a twenty-minute drive from my house.