Is BRICS becoming an anti-West alliance?

Vladimir Putin has been looking forward to this week. On Tuesday, the Russian president will welcome leaders from the BRICS bloc of emerging market economies in a show of defiance to U.S. and European attempts to make him a global pariah. BRICS was once a group of just five countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—that has expanded to officially include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. Moscow says 32 countries will participate in this year’s summit in Kazan, Russia.

As FP’s Keith Johnson writes , though Western capitals dismiss the group as a grab bag of countries, “it is hard to appreciate just how much resentment there is of Western hypocrisy and hegemony, all mortar helping to bond the loose membership of BRICS.” The BRICS countries can be said to represent a desire for an alternate global order. It is probably not a coincidence that the summit is not only being held in Russia but is also taking place as two Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—hold their fall meetings in Washington.

“In recent years … the IMF has diverged from its obligation to support countries in need,” write Andrés Arauz and Ivana Vasic-Lalovic of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. In their Argument “The IMF Has Lost Its Way ,” the economists offer what they call “five quick fixes” to move the IMF out of its old ways—austerity and conditionality—and into sync with a changed world confronting a climate emergency.

Meanwhile, the World Bank has lulled itself into a complacent belief that what it was doing was working, Oxford University’s Paul Collier writes in “The World Bank Is Failing And Needs a Restart .” If current trends continue, “the global poverty count will soon revert to its grim pre-1990 upward March,” he argues, adding that the prospect of rising poverty “should be galvanizing the bank into action.”—The Editors

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Exercise Your Mind

?A ship carrying 16 migrants arrived in which country last Wednesday as part of a controversial new deal whereby Italy will process asylum-seekers there?

A. Serbia

B. Turkey

C. Albania

D. North Macedonia

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Answer: C. Italy’s far-right government has undertaken strict new measures in an attempt to combat a surge in migration, Michele Barbero wrote last year. Test your global news knowledge with our weekly “What in the World?” quiz. Go to the latest edition .