Jakarta, 24 June 2026 — The expanded BRICS grouping faces questions over its capacity for collective action, given the impacts of the West Asia crisis, as well as hope at the chance of an alternative path of existing parallel to the current global world order. This is the gathered conclusion from the Focus Group Discussion (FGD) convened by the Asia Middle East Center for Research and Dialogue (AMEC) in Jakarta on 24 June 2026, titled “BRICS and Indonesia in a Changing Global Order: Implications of the West Asia Crisis for the Global South.” The geographic scope of the Middle East includes the expanse between the Mauritania and Iran, but West Asia refers to a region confined to the boundaries between Turkey and Kyrgyzstan.

The FGD was opened by the Director of AMEC, Dr Muslim Imran, and moderated by Dr Asep Setiawan, Regional Coordinator of AMEC and Lecturer in Political Science at Universitas Muhammadiyah Jakarta. The discussion brought together four speakers; Mr. Chua Tian Chang, former Member of the Malaysian Parliament, and International Strategic Advisor at the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission; Ms. Diana E.S. Sutikno, Senior Policy Strategist at the Center for Policy Strategy for the Asia Pacific and Africa; Dr. Abdul Razak Ahmad, Founding Director of Bait Al-Amanah; and Mr. Calvin Khoe, Executive Secretary and Director of Research and Analysis at FPCI, in addition to an audience of policymakers and diplomats.

FROM BANDUNG TO BRICS: DECOLONISATION, ECONOMIC SOVEREIGNTY, AND THE POLITICS OF SOLIDARITY

Mr. Chua Tian Chang, former Member of the Malaysian Parliament, situated Indonesia’s BRICS membership within a longer arc of Global South self-determination, from the 1955 Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement through to BRICS’s establishment in 2009, framing the grouping as a genuine and productive vehicle for collective advancement. Where NAM was a project of political non-alignment, Chua argued, BRICS is its economic successor: the same postcolonial aspiration transposed into issues of trade, resources, and development finance. Drawing on ASEAN’s trajectory, from its anti-communist origins through the export-led growth model that culminated in the 1997 financial crisis, he cautioned that integration into the global economy on unfavourable terms reproduces dependency rather than resolving it. BRICS, in his reading, is neither altruistic nor oppositional but instrumental: a platform for collective bargaining that allows member states to leverage their combined economic weight for individual domestic development, without submitting to the binding conditionalities of Western-led institutions.

BRICS AS YET TO DELIVER: THE CASE FOR PRAGMATIC MULTILATERALISM

Mr. Calvin Khoe, Executive Secretary and Director of Research and Analysis at FPCI, offered the discussion’s most sceptical assessment of BRICS’s record. Intra-BRICS trade has grown only marginally since 2009, investment flows remain heavily China-dominated, and BRICS members do not vote collectively within the WTO, meaning the bloc that looms large in geopolitical discourse is, in actual trade governance, largely absent. The New Development Bank, while useful, remains complementary rather than transformative, and for Indonesia specifically the evidence is thin: trade with China was already substantial before accession, investment from other members remains minimal, and no meaningful new markets have opened. Compounding this, member states hold irreconcilable visions for the grouping, China’s geopolitical platform, India’s non-aligned economic forum, Russia’s anti-Western instrument, leaving BRICS without the internal coherence to act as a unified force. Khoe’s prescription was not abandonment but recalibration: strengthen existing institutions like the UN, pursue north-south middle power partnerships that combine southern expertise with northern capital, and focus on translating the political emancipation won at Bandung into the economic emancipation that remains, seven decades later, unfinished.

DYNAMIC RESILIENCE: INDONESIA AS CO-ARCHITECT OF A NEW INTERNATIONAL ORDER

Ms. Diana E.S. Sutikno, Senior Policy Strategist at the Center for Policy Strategy for the Asia Pacific and Africa and Indonesia’s first female Consul General in Osaka, argued that the developments in West Asia have reaffirmed the continued relevance of Indonesia’s foundational foreign policy doctrine: Bebas dan Aktif, Independent and Active. Under President Prabowo Subianto’s leadership, and as consistently emphasised by Indonesia’s Foreign Minister, this principle is given contemporary expression through what she termed Dynamic Resilience: maintaining strategic autonomy while remaining an active contributor to peace, development, and international cooperation. On BRICS diplomacy, her approach was pragmatic: where consensus proves elusive, the diplomatic task is to identify language that all parties can endorse and to press forward. For the Global South, a formidable majority struggling with cohesion, BRICS offers a meaningful platform for development finance, trade policy, financial resilience, and global representation. Within this framework, she argued, Indonesia is positioned to serve as a connector state and bridge-builder: channelling ASEAN’s perspective into BRICS deliberations while simultaneously amplifying Global South priorities across broader international forums, deepening cooperation among developing nations while sustaining constructive engagement with all partners, and advancing an emerging multipolar order that is inclusive, stable, and rules-based. Indonesia intends not merely to participate in that transformation. Indonesia intends to help shape it. In an era of uncertainty, our objective remains clear and that is to ensure that the Global South is not merely an object of international politics, but a co-architect of the emerging global order.

ENERGY, RESILIENCE, AND THE LIMITS OF NON-ALIGNMENT: LESSONS FROM THE WEST ASIA CRISIS

Dr Abdul Razak Ahmad, Founding Director of Bait Al-Amanah, opened with a bold proposition: economics, defence, and security cannot be disentangled, and the West Asia crisis has made this impossible to ignore. Iran, he argued, wields a weapon more powerful than a nuclear arsenal, the capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz and hold the global economy hostage, and Washington’s failure to anticipate this reflects four decades of refusing to engage Tehran on its own terms, underestimating a state that has never delayed an election by a single day and has built durable institutions across governance, science, and defence. For BRICS, the crisis is instructive because the bloc now comprises nations embedded in the region’s shifting and occasionally contradictory alliance networks, making consensus harder and the stakes of incoherence higher. What BRICS must orient itself around, Dr Razak argued, is not de-dollarisation or geopolitical posturing but the practical work of building economic resilience, particularly energy security, whose disruption cascades far beyond fuel prices into the supply chains that affect farmers, manufacturers, and households across the Global South. A grouping that cannot address these risks becomes just another affiliation. He closed with a call for principled non-selectivity: a genuine non-aligned posture means engaging all parties on a level playing field, state and non-state alike, because closing avenues of negotiation does not make difficult interlocutors disappear. The lesson of the Strait of Hormuz, he suggested, is precisely this: when diplomacy shuts its doors, ships stop moving.

In its concept paper for today’s discussion, AMEC, a Southeast Asian based think tank dedicated to advancing research and dialogue between Asia and the Middle East, noted that the expanded BRICS framework offers both significant opportunities and genuine dilemmas for countries of the Global South. Today’s FGD forms part of AMEC’s broader 2026 research programme on BRICS cooperation.

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