If Turkey and Saudi Arabia follow Indonesia in joining the bloc, it could gain more geopolitical heft.
By Oliver Stuenkel, an associate professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, and Margot Treadwell, a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
As Brazil prepares to host this year’s BRICS summit in July, the bloc is celebrating a historic expansion. Yet it also faces uncertainty about its future.
In January, BRICS officially welcomed Indonesia as its 10th member, a move that reflects the group’s growing appeal across the global south. Nine countries also accepted invitations to become BRICS partner countries, a vaguely defined category that allows government representatives to join the bloc’s meetings without voting power or commitment.
BRICS member and partner countries now include more than half the world’s population and account for more than 40 percent of global GDP. But there’s an elephant in the room: Saudi Arabia has yet to respond to a BRICS membership invitation that it received in 2023, and…
