Reconfiguring regional power: BRICS economic and strategic engagement in the Middle East, 2020–2024

Abstract

This article examines BRICS economic, strategic, financial, and normative engagement in the Middle East between 2020 and 2024, conceptualizing BRICS+ as a dual political form: a collective platform of non-Western institutional coordination and a constellation of divergent national strategies. The study combines structured discourse analysis of five BRICS summit declarations, comparative case analysis of Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, and secondary quantitative evidence on trade, development finance, payment systems, and reserve-currency dominance. China primarily advances infrastructure, energy interdependence, financial connectivity, and selective mediation; Russia relies more on security diplomacy, energy coordination, and anti-sanctions narratives; and India practices strategic hedging through simultaneous BRICS participation, Gulf partnerships, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, and continued engagement with Western institutions. Regional actors use BRICS-related ties to widen strategic options rather than replace existing Western partnerships. BRICS-linked trade, development finance, local-currency mechanisms, and CBDC experimentation have expanded, but remain insufficient to displace the United States-centered security architecture or the dollar-centered monetary system. BRICS contributes to a qualified pluralization of Middle Eastern regional order. Its influence is cumulative rather than revolutionary and is mediated through regional agency, infrastructural power, monetary experimentation, and internal contradictions among BRICS members.