by RANJAN SOLOMON
When BRICS was first conceived, it was often reduced in Western commentary to an economic acronym, a clever grouping of emerging markets seeking to balance the financial weight of the United States and Europe. Yet beneath that pragmatic exterior, BRICS has always contained a deeper philosophical vision: the assertion that the Global South will no longer be dictated to by imperial centres of power, but will reclaim voice, agency, and destiny.
Palestine’s entry into BRICS will be more than another accession. It will be the completion of a circle that began at Bandung in 1955, when leaders of Asia and Africa declared that the age of colonialism was over, that the newly independent would not be pawns in a Cold War, but agents of a multipolar world.
If Bandung was the first great articulation of non-alignment, Palestine’s entry into BRICS will be the declaration of a new era: decolonisation in practice, backed by institutions, resources, and political muscle. BRICS is not NAM reborn, it is its spiritual heir, built on a decolonial vision. Where NAM offered a moral counterweight, BRICS offers structural counterpower:
- The New Development Bank, a rival to the World Bank and IMF.
- The push for de-dollarisation, weakening the chokehold of the U.S. currency.
- South-South technology, energy, and infrastructure exchanges.
- A political bloc representing over 40 per cent of humanity, speaking from the margins of empire.
Kwame Nkrumah warned that “neo-colonialism is the last stage of imperialism”. BRICS is a collective refusal of this stage. It seeks to build a world where development is not hostage to conditional loans, where trade does not mean dependency, and where sovereignty is not crushed by sanctions. In the writings of Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein, dependency theory and world-systems analysis exposed the way global capitalism entrenched the periphery’s subordination to the core. BRICS is a concrete effort to erode that structure.
If any nation embodies the unfinished business of decolonisation, it is Palestine. Edward Said reminded us that Palestine is not only a territorial struggle but a symbol of resistance against the permanence of colonial domination.
While Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, and others eventually broke the chains of settler colonialism, Palestine remains under siege — militarily, economically, and epistemically. Its admission into BRICS would be a profound correction of historical injustice: the occupied will now sit among the architects of a new order. This would mark a Bandung 2.0 moment. As Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth: *“Decolonization is truly the creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the thing which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.”
Palestine’s entry into BRICS is precisely this: a declaration that Palestinians will not only resist occupation but actively shape the emerging multipolar world. Their participation ensures that decolonisation is not only a memory of the twentieth century but a living practice in the twenty-first.
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