BRICS serves as a platform for more countries' voices to be heard, while its recent expansion helps counter the often Western-dominated global order by bringing together more international players from the Global South, experts said on Wednesday while attending a forum held in Beijing via video link.
The Global South Think Tanks Forum, which was jointly held by the International Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the China Media Group (CMG), invited representatives of 40 think tanks from Global South countries to discuss the future of global development amid an era of great change and turbulence.
The forum came just head of the annual BRICS summit, which is set to take place in Russia's Kazan from Oct 22-24. It will gather leaders from the BRICS organization, which initially included the six emerging-market economies Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, before expanding earlier this year to include five new members of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iran, and Ethiopia.
The upcoming summit will be the first to be held since the group's expansion, with many believing the growth of the organization will enable more countries' voices to be heard on the international stage.
"Any expansion would mean that there is more voices to those who were unheard, more voices to those people who were left out in the process of integration," said Aravind Yelery, a professor at Nehru University in India.
The Global South, which carries a roughly 40 percent share of the global GDP and accounts for 85 percent of the world's population, is experiencing a rising importance in global affairs, and many see the expansion of BRICS as an opportunity to provide more balance against the Western-dominated international order.
"One of the key things that BRICS and particularly BRICS Plus brings is a chance to counter what has been a very strong Western domination across the global order. For countries like Saudi Arabia, this makes a massive difference in having trading partners that come with some equality from the East as well," said Riz Khan, a journalist for Al-Arabiya.
The inclusion of the UAE, meanwhile, provides the Gulf nation with the chance to build more global connections, according to a researcher from the country.
"The greatest, I would say, interest for the UAE to join the BRICS is to maybe provide more connection and more joining of the dots from all around the world. And so it's a good time for now to maybe have the UAE to enhance the BRICS and maybe make it more mature, of having such an international player, I would say worldwide," said Najla Al Zarouni, a senior researcher at the UAE Trends Research and Advisory Center.
BRICS expansion enables more voices of Global South to be heard: experts
