Are the BRICS reformers, revolutionaries, or counter-revolutionaries?

Abstract

This article argues that the five-nation BRICS group has played a significant role in pressing for reforms in the Western-dominated global order, as well as mounting some revolutionary (and as yet unresolved) challenges to that order. However, it also maintains that there is another (underestimated) aspect to the BRICS' role, viz, their conservative or counter-revolutionary challenges to liberal trends towards democracy, human rights and the progressive evolution of international law. It then discusses how ‘the West’ has responded to these pressures from the BRICS, and other rising powers, and points to uncertainties raised by the recent growth of ‘populist’ pressures within the West itself against aspects of the liberal economic, political and cultural order.