1. Framing the BRICS
‘Framing the BRICS’ explains that the BRICS can be viewed according to three different frameworks. First, as initially conceived by Goldman Sachs, the BRIC describes a set of big and fast-growing economies. Second, the BRICS has developed into an informal diplomatic club with a dual personality as both an insider and outsider in the global system. Third, the BRICS can be viewed as representing a geostrategic challenge and possible transformative threat to the existing international order dominated by the United States and the advanced industrial economies of the West. Is there potential for the BRICS to act as a rival to the G7 and a destabilizing force in the Western-centred global system?