The grouping consisting of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) was initially meant to be nothing more than clever investment jargon referring to the largest and most attractive emerging economies. However, these countries identified with the BRIC concept, and started to meet annually as a group in 2008. At their fourth summit in 2011, they added South Africa to become the BRICS. By then the BRICS had fully morphed from investment jargon to a name for a new economic and political grouping that had the potential to challenge the unipolar hegemony of the United States and its Western allies. This work analyses the extent to which the concept of coexistence explains the individual foreign policies of the BRICS countries. The editors define coexistence as a strategy that promotes the establishment of a rule-based system for co-managing the global order. It recognizes that different states may legitimately pursue their own political and economic interests, but they have to do so within the bounds of a rule-based international system that ensures the peaceful coexistence of states. The BRICS and Coexistence addresses the political dimension of the emergence and influence of the BRICS in the international system and will be of interest to students and scholars of Politics, Development and International Relations.

The grouping consisting of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) was initially meant to be nothing more than clever investment jargon referring to the largest and most attractive emerging economies. However, these countries identified with the BRIC concept, and started to meet annually as a group in 2008. At their fourth summit in 2011, they added South Africa to become the BRICS. By then the BRICS had fully morphed from investment jargon to a name for a new economic and political grouping that had the potential to challenge the unipolar hegemony of the United States and its Western allies. This work analyses the extent to which the concept of coexistence explains the individual foreign policies of the BRICS countries. The editors define coexistence as a strategy that promotes the establishment of a rule-based system for co-managing the global order. It recognizes that different states may legitimately pursue their own political and economic interests, but they have to do so within the bounds of a rule-based international system that ensures the peaceful coexistence of states. The BRICS and Coexistence addresses the political dimension of the emergence and influence of the BRICS in the international system and will be of interest to students and scholars of Politics, Development and International Relations.

The world is in an era of great transformations. Globalization, transnational capitalism, September 11, the 2008 global financial crises, and the emergence of the ’second world’ in general and the BRICS in particular are characterized by a diffusion of power away from the traditional North Western powers and towards the global South. Such great transformations have reshaped the terrain and parameters of social, economic and political relations both at the national and the global levels and have exerted pressure on the exiting international order in terms of both opportunities and constraints. This new era also urges the need for re-conceptualizing the changing world order especially with regard to one of the core conceptual categories and analytical apparatus in the studies of IR and IPE - hegemony. The world will witness a new era of interdependent hegemony, in which both the existing ’First World’ and the emerging ’Second World’ are intertwined in a constant process of shaping and reshaping the international order in the nexus of national interest, regional orientation, common economic and political agenda, political alliance and potential conflicts. This collection juxtaposes, from different perspectives and approaches, the discussion on the political economy of the emerging world order with a focus on the rising powers.

The transformation of the BRIC acronym from an investment term into a household name of international politics and into a semi-institutionalized political outfit (called BRICS, with a capital ‘S’), is one of the defining developments in international politics in the past decades. While the concept is now commonly used in the general public debate and international media, there has not yet been a comprehensive and scholarly analysis of the history of the BRICS term. The BRICS and the Future of Global Order, Second Edition offers a definitive reference history of the BRICS as a term and as an institution—a chronological narrative and analytical account of the BRICS concept from its inception in 2001 to the political grouping it is today. In addition, it analyzes what the rise of powers like Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa means for the future of global order. Will the BRICS countries seek to establish a parallel system with its own distinctive set of rules, institutions, and currencies of power, rejecting key tenets of liberal internationalism, are will they seek to embrace the rules and norms that define today’s Western-led order?

This book explores how BRICS countries respond to, and get involved in, large scale armed conflict. It argues that through responding to armed conflict and deviating from the preferred Western foreign policy, BRICS countries are actively involved in building a multi-polar and post-western world order. The author develops a concise typology of response types portraying a nuanced picture of the BRICS grouping. Responses reach from non-coercive and cooperative multi-lateral behaviour reaching to neo-imperial unilateralism and military intervention. The book explains the selection of response types with reference to six variables which refer to the proximity to war, availability of power resources, the type of conflict, economic interests, the BRICS normative agenda and global humanitarian norms. Four armed conflicts in Libya, Syria, South Sudan and the Ukraine are chosen to illustrate the BRICS engagement with large scale armed conflicts.

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa represent almost 18 per cent of the world economy, with their contribution to world growth having already exceeded 50 per cent. But what does the emergence of the BRICS mean for global politics? Andrew Cooper discusses the BRICS as a concept and its practice in global politics.

Exploring to what extent the BRICS group is a significant actor challenging the global order, this book focuses on the degree and consequence of their emergence and explores how important cooperation is to individual BRICS members’ foreign policy strategies and potential relevance as leaders in regional and global governance. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) have come to play an important role on the global political scene. As a group, and as individual countries, they have taken initiatives to establish new institutions, and have engaged in yearly summits that coordinate their voice and focus on intra-BRICS cooperation. In this sense, the BRICS may be seen as a "balancing coalition", and often the main opposing force to Western powers. Looking at the debate around the role of the BRICS as an actor, expert contributors also explore the international political economy (IPE) of individual BRICS countries as systemically important countries with highly asymmetrical individual power capacities. The comprehensive theoretical and empirical coverage of this timely volume will be especially useful to students, researchers and professionals interested in ongoing academic debates around the IPE of emerging powers, and those researching global governance and globalization.