The world’s economic centre of gravity is moving from the Atlantic toward Asia. This reflects the rise of China and India and the dynamism of the BRICS.

The international economic and monetary system is in a period of profound turbulence and structural uncertainty. Chinese analysts describe the present moment as da bian ju – a “great upheaval” – which captures the sense that long‑standing assumptions about global order no longer hold.

For much of the post-Cold War era, scholars, mainly Western, characterised the system as unipolar, anchored by US hegemony and a liberal institutional architecture centred on open markets, multilateral governance and Western leadership. Yet over the past two decades, this order has been increasingly contested, subtly of course, reflecting the power in quiet efficiency over bellicose populism. Economic power has shifted toward Asia and the wider Global South, confidence in Western‑led institutions has eroded, and new coalitions have emerged seeking to reshape the distribution of influence in global governance.

The BRICS group of countries, initially Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, but now with several more, have long-held grievances about western dominance – some consider arrogance – in global governance. They have a collective desire for greater representation in international institutions: an understandable quest if economic power, trade domination and population shares are considered adequate credentials.

Exasperated by the exclusionary practices of the West, in 2023, Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, during a rare moment of disclosure, said rather than BRICS members being concerned with issues of democracy versus autocracy, as is the case for the west, they were interested more in development, poverty, food, energy, health, climate change and peace. The subtlety of this warning was, as usual, lost among the liberal-democratic powers, and so, BRICS continued its strategy of creating alternatives to the institutions created at Bretton Woods in 1944.

Through the........

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