The Brazilian BRICS summit should be recognised as quite successful both in promoting new topics on the agenda and in the declared common approaches, which more clearly than before reflect the position of the countries of the Global Non-West and the South in world politics, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Oleg Barabanov.
The annual BRICS summit was held on July 6-7, 2025 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For the first time, Indonesia participated as a full member of BRICS, along with 10 new partner countries. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov attended in person while President Vladimir Putin took part in the summit via video link. The heads of state of China, Egypt, Iran, and the UAE did not attend either, opting to send representatives. It should be noted that it’s fairly rare for heads of state to fail to show up at BRICS summits. Of the new BRICS partner countries, the leaders of Bolivia, Cuba, Malaysia, and Nigeria arrived, while the heads of state of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam did not.
The agenda of the global meetings is such that Brazil is hosting three major multilateral summits this year. In late 2024, Brazil hosted the G20 summit. At the initiative of President Lula da Silva, the Global Alliance to Fight Hunger and Poverty was created, and the corresponding financial indicators for the participating countries were defined. This topic has been a focal point for President Lula for a long time, and is also key to Brazil’s internal development. This very real and concrete institutional initiative distinguished the Brazilian G20 summit from many other meetings, where everything often comes down to just the right beautiful words.
The global climate summit COP-30 is scheduled to take place in Brazil in November. This topic in the context of the Amazon rainforest and deforestation is also a top priority for Brazil. In addition, the COP-30 summit will be associated with two anniversaries in global climate policy: the 20th anniversary of the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol and the 10th anniversary of the adoption of the Paris Agreement. Accordingly, Brazil is currently carrying out a great deal of preparatory work to hold this summit, both in the organisational and in the semantic, substantive sense.
In the interval between these two summits, which are key to the Brazilian agenda, this country also hosted the BRICS summit. Initially, according to the schedule of meetings, Brazil was supposed to host the BRICS summit a year ago, in 2024. However, at the time it overlapped with Brazil’s preparations for the G20 summit. As a result, an agreement was reached that Brazil and Russia would change places in the summit schedule. Russia hosted the BRICS summit a year ago in Kazan in 2024 instead of 2025, and the Brazilian BRICS summit was postponed from 2024 to 2025. Thus, it overlapped with preparations for the COP-30climate summit.
As a result, in the media space, one could sometimes encounter concerns that the Brazilian BRICS summit would be a mediocre one, that the country’s priorities were focused elsewhere. But, in general, these concerns were not justified. If we look at the documentary results of the summit, then apart from the traditional general declaration following the meeting, three additional documents on individual thematic issues were prepared and adopted for the Brazilian BRICS summit. These are the Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence, the Framework Declaration on Climate Finance, and the creation of the BRICS Partnership for the Elimination of Socially Determined Diseases.
It should be noted that, unlike the G7 (and to a certain extent the G20), in practice, BRICS summits rarely adopt special thematic documents in addition to the general declaration. Now, three documents have been adopted. At the same time, the document on climate financing fits directly into the agenda of the upcoming COP-30 summit in Brazil and represents a coordinated position of the BRICS countries on perhaps the most pressing issue of global climate policy, on which there are serious differences between developed and developing countries. Thus, in this matter, we can truly say that thanks to this Brazilian document, BRICS is becoming a consolidated voice of the Global South on the key topic of the world agenda.
This declaration directly states that for climate financing “the provision and mobilisation of resources is a responsibility of developed countries towards developing countries.” Developed countries are also “strongly urged” (in the English text of the document, in contrast to the Russian translation published on the Kremlin website, the softer term “we urge” is used) “to provide climate finance that is new and additional, grants-based, distinct from Official Development Assistance and that does not come at the expense of assistance for other development needs, including poverty eradication.” As a result, it seems that this BRICS document will be used by Brazil and the countries of the Global South at the upcoming climate summit in this very context.
The second separate document, the partnership to combat socially conditioned diseases, also fits into the theme of Brazil’s top-priority project in the G20 last year – the fight against poverty and hunger. Thus, here too, we can see the continuity of the agenda of the Brazilian presidency from one international structure to another. Incidentally, this was not always the case before, and in our recent Valdai Club report on the evolution of the BRICS value platform we cited examples when one or another BRICS country held both a BRICS summit and a G20 summit within a year or two, but there was much less continuity of the priorities of the chairing country in the agenda of these two meetings.
Finally, the third separate document of the Brazilian BRICS summit – on artificial intelligence – also represents a coordinated approach of the countries of the Global Non-West and South on this issue. Here, we can trace, among other things, a certain overlap in the agenda with the G7 summit in Canada that took place a couple of weeks earlier, where a separate statement on artificial intelligence was also adopted. In the aforementioned report, we cited examples of how BRICS had previously responded to the G7 agenda quite often, but this was usually with a much longer time lag. In those cases, BRICS touched on topics that the G7 had discussed six months to a year earlier. Now, if we do not assume that the idea of a separate statement on artificial intelligence was inserted into the BRICS summit agenda at the last moment after the June G7 summit, then we are seeing a rather rare, practically parallel and simultaneous elaboration of an important topic by the G7, on the one hand, and BRICS, on the other. In this regard, it does not seem accidental that BRICS in this Brazilian statement focused specifically on issues of artificial intelligence governance and fair geographic representation in this governance process. Thus, this statement can also be presented as a consolidated voice of the Global South parallel to the voice of the West in the G7.
Among the principles of global AI governance put forward in this BRICS statement are that “digital sovereignty and the right to development are central to global AI governance,” that “access to AI technology should be fair, equitable, enabling and inclusive,” and that “a balanced approach is needed to protect intellectual property and safeguard the public interest.” The latter principle reflects a trend that was evident, as we noted in the aforementioned report, during the early BRICS summits, where the topic of open patents was raised to facilitate developing countries’ access to intellectual property products created mainly in the West. Then this topic disappeared from the BRICS agenda, and returned to it during the COVID pandemic. At the same time, as noted in the report, BRICS, strange as it may seem at first glance, sometimes took an even more cautious position on this issue than the G20. But now in the Brazilian document, this topic has returned quite openly. All this contrasts sharply with the parallel statement of the G7, which emphasises more general “human-centric” approaches to artificial intelligence. The Brazilian BRICS statement looks stronger in its ambition than a similar statement by the G7 (which, again, has not always been the case in the history of parallel agendas).
As a result, the Brazilian BRICS summit, in our opinion, should be recognised as quite successful both in promoting new topics on the agenda and in the declared common approaches, which more clearly than before reflect the position of the countries of the Global Non-West and the South in world politics.
Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.