The emergence of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) as an alternative force to the West has ignited a debate within the discipline of international political economy on the nature of the group’s rise. Global governance scholars either debate the role of the BRICS in transforming the world order (playing the game) or focus on the domestic sources of the BRICS nations’ preference formation (the position of states within the game). This article goes beyond the game-versus-player debate, by focusing on the structural power of the BRICS to ‘change the rules of the game’. The article investigates how the BRICS-created New Development Bank as an alternative circuit for actors to exchange goods in the area of development finance has been integrated into global governance. The article argues that the New Development Bank does not grant the BRICS the structural power needed to change the rules and norms that underpin the game.

Over the past decades, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries have experienced significant economic growth. However, their political voices in global governance have not grown on par with their economic surge. The contributions to the symposium ‘The BRICS, Global Governance, and Challenges for South–South Cooperation in a Post-Western World’ argue there is a quest for emerging markets and developing countries to play a more significant role in global governance. There is a widening gap between the actual role of emerging markets and developing countries in the global system and their ability to participate in that system. However, for the moment, various domestic and international political-economic challenges limit this quest. To understand why this is the case, one should understand the BRICS phenomenon in the broader context of the global power shift towards the Global South.

This article addresses challenges to the established international order. Its critique becomes particularly discernible at the domestic level, where political and economic frameworks are contested by electorates and anti-establishment movements in Western countries, engulfed by anti-globalisation sentiments and disillusioned with the asymmetric formula of globalisation. Populism implies that the ‘social revolt’ facing the West today, regardless of whether it takes place in France, Greece, Hungary, Poland, the UK or the USA, is not a legitimate response to deep-seated problems but rather is the problem itself. The main aims of this article are to investigate what has caused this surge of support for populism in the West; what the role of the default system of economic governance is in inspiring populist resentment; and, finally, what the identity crisis, stemming from ‘hyperglobalisation’, and wrecking the social order in Western societies has to do with fear, (un)fairness and the redistributive effects of economic globalisation.