The other summit season: BRICS and the SCO have spotted a gap

BRICS is a bigger affair and has global reach. Beyond the original five (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), its members include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia and the UAE. Representing half the world’s population and 40% of global GDP, the body has critical mass.

The SCO is more than a quarter-century old while BRICS is a post-GFC creation founded in 2009. Yet for much of their existence, beyond some rhetorical flourishes, their ambitions were relatively limited. The SCO was for its first dozen years or so focused primarily on Central Asian border security and counter-terrorism. While BRICS sought major reforms of the global economic order, it had to settle for the creation of a relatively meagre new development bank in 2014.

Both groupings have, in recent years, sought to position themselves in more expansive terms. This has come in part through the admission of new members. The SCO’s membership expanded from 2017 while new members joined BRICS from 2023 onwards. With the larger geographic footprint has come expanded ambition.

Here, the two bodies differ. The SCO, which timed its 25th summit last year to coincide with China’s Second World War commemorations, is geopolitically ambitious but ultimately focused on security matters in Central Asia and Eurasia. While it has issued broad-ranging statements about international order and globalisation, there has been little of substance beyond grand rhetoric.

BRICS is far more ambitious. At its most recent summit, the New Delhi Declaration ran to nearly 45 pages, covering everything from UN reform to restructuring of the Bretton Woods Institutions, people-to-people diplomacy and even new university ranking systems. If the SCO is ultimately about security, BRICS wants to restructure international order along lines it considers more representative of the world, and of the Global South.

The recent expansion of the groupings is part of a larger trend in which illiberal and authoritarian powers are increasingly cooperating to advance their interests. They are doing so not just because of the ambitions and growing power of their members but because they sense an opportunity created by the failings of existing institutions. The criticisms of the institutions built by the old North Atlantic world – that they are unrepresentative of contemporary realities, that they do not serve the needs of the world’s less well-off, that they are dysfunctional or worse – are real. BRICS and the SCO have spotted a gap in the institutional market. The West has been slow to notice.

For Australia, a further development is of note. Both BRICS and the SCO were once groupings of little interest to Southeast Asian states. In recent years, this has begun to change. Indonesia’s interest in BRICS is telling; Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam all took part in the 2026 summit alongside the ASEAN chair. Myanmar and Laos have become dialogue partners of the SCO, and ASEAN has been represented at recent summits.

This in part reflects the widening reach of these groupings and their efforts to advance less Western-centred forms of cooperation. It also reflects a trend of Southeast Asian states looking beyond ASEAN for influence and advantage. This move is not necessarily something that will cost ASEAN, but from an Australian point of view, it is crucial to understand the ways its neighbours are positioning themselves as the broader global order changes.