BRICS
Founding
Collective action in the political arena in the late 1990s was present before the economic rationale of BRICS. The idea of a multipolar group like BRICS can be traced back to Yevgeny Primakov during his term as Minister of Foreign Affairs) of Russia. He reiterated the idea in New Delhi in 1998. The forums RIC (Russia, India, China) and IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) predated and played an important role in the creation of BRIC and subsequently BRICS.
Founding
The term BRIC), as compared to the alternate term CRIB, was originally developed in the context of foreign investment strategies. It was introduced in the 2001 publication, Building Better Global Economic BRICs by Jim O'Neill, then head of global economics research at Goldman Sachs and later Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. O'Neill now regards the BRICS group as a failed project. In a 2021 article for Project Syndicate he wrote that the BRICS countries "have so far proven incapable of uniting as a meaningful global force" and felt in 2024 that "each year also brings further confirmation that the grouping serves no real purpose beyond generating symbolic gestures and lofty rhetoric".
Founding
The foreign ministers of the initial four BRIC states (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) met in New York City in September 2006 at the margins of the General Debate of the UN Assembly, beginning a series of high-level meetings. A full-scale diplomatic meeting was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on 16 June 2009.