Given their immense potential for development and representation of a new international political and economic order, the BRICS countries have become a strong nascent force on the global stage. However, as overall economic growth continues to slow down, and the geopolitical situation becomes more complex, the BRICS countries are facing a series of new challenges that require further development in the way they cooperate with one another. This volume offers a panoramic view of cooperation between the BRICS countries in the light of these new challenges. The editors reveal that policy coordination has been strengthened, bringing into play complementary advantages as viable ways for promoting robust, sustainable, and balanced growth in the world economy. They argue that the experience gained, and lessons learned in the development of and cooperation between the BRICS countries has offered a positive role model for cooperation between other countries as well as providing valuable lessons for research in international politics. Students and scholars in international relations and politics will benefit from this volume.

This is the first book to critically analyze the future of higher education systems in the four BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - and the USA, analyzing academic salaries, contracts and working conditions and how national policy will affect the academic profession in each context.

The BRICS in the New International Legal Order on Investment: Reformers or Disruptors is written by international experts with BRICS backgrounds. The book investigates why and how the BRICS countries modernize their approach to the investment treaty regime. The chapters are organized by BRICS countries and discuss whether they can develop a common approach to investment treaties as well as what these countries will bring to the investment treaty regime in the future. The volume provides important perspectives on how the BRICS, an emerging power hub in international society, engage in the international legal order.

A critical examination of the contradictory rise to power of emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

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 is a study of higher education in the world's four largest developing economies—Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Already important players globally, by mid-century, they are likely to be economic powerhouses. But whether they reach that level of development will depend in part on how successfully they create quality higher education that puts their labor forces at the cutting edge of the information society. Using an empirical, comparative approach, this book develops a broad picture of the higher education system in each country in the context of both global and local forces. The authors offer insights into how differing socioeconomic and historic patterns of change and political contexts influence developments in higher education. In asking why each state takes the approach that it does, this work situates a discussion of university expansion and quality in the context of governments' educational policies and reflects on the larger struggles over social goals and the distribution of national resources.

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.