The epistemology of power: Why BRICS must build a common scientific architecture

Geopolitical parity rests on knowledge before it rests on money or arms. A nation without an autonomous scientific and technological base remains subordinate, obliged to accept whatever terms the owners of technology choose to set. Thisprinciple applies to groupings of nations, and perhaps nowhere is its significance more evident than in the expanded BRICS. The BRICS countries together represent nearly half of humanity and about 40% of global GDP measured at purchasing-power parity, giving the grouping substantial demographic and economic weight. But its longer-term significance may lie even more in science, technology and innovation. With the rapidly changing geopolitical situation,BRICS has an opportunity to build collective scientific capacity and technological resilience. Pooled research infrastructure, shared facilities, open scientific networks and collaborative innovation can give member states a greater voice in shaping the technologies, norms and technical standards that will define the future of humanity.

A shifting baseline

For most of the last century, the G7 dominated global economic governance, where high-value intellectual property enabled the advanced economies to shape the terms of technology transfer, often leaving developing countries in the position of licensees rather than technology creators. That baseline is now shifting. The economic weight of the BRICS countries is rising rapidly, accompanied by expanding scientific capacity, technological capabilities and research infrastructure.

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Yet excellence in individual BRICS countries does not automatically translate into collective strength. Member states differ substantially in income, research infrastructure, data-governance regimes, regulatory frameworks and intellectual-property laws. Recognizing this, the learned academies of Science in the BRICS countries have resolved to work on promoting the developmental problems through Science, Technology and Innovation, and offer high level policy advice on these matters.

Intellectual property and the right to survive

The case for BRICS integration is strongest in public health. COVID-19 showed exactly where international solidarity endsIn October 2020, India and South Africa jointly proposed at the WTO that certain TRIPS obligations be temporarily suspended so that vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments could be manufactured more widely rather than in handful of firms holding the relevant patents. The proposal drew support from more than ninety countries and, notably, endorsement from the BRICS grouping as a bloc, yet a cluster of high-income members- the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, Switzerland, Norway, and the EU withheld support.

For BRICS technological security cannot be outsourced; it has to be built, redundantly, inside the bloc itself, before it is needed. In the era of artificial intelligence, this logic carries even greater weight, and for a reason that goes beyond infrastructure.

BRICS countries have something distinctive to contribute beyond simply catching up in technological capability. They possess long and diverse intellectual traditions which address the nature of personhood and moral status; the relationship between the individual and the collective; and the obligations and limits that accompany power over the lives of others, all of which are relevant in AI. The long cultural traditions in the BRICS countries provide conceptual vocabularies that differ in important ways from the frameworks of the Global North that currently dominate international AI-governance discourse.

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On 22–23 July 2026, the Indian National Science Academy(INSA) convened the BRICS Science Academies Forum. Its joint statement, endorsed by the national academies of Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa, together with partner-country academies from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria and Vietnam, identified areas: advanced materials and manufacturing, healthcare, climate and environmental prediction, agriculture and food security, and disaster management. It echoes that AI capability remains concentrated in a small number of countries and firms, and countries that merely consume frontier models risk inheriting not only their training biases but also the technological and regulatory assumptions of their developers.

The statement proposes a BRICS AI Research and Innovation Network spanning member and partner academies, with the ambition of developing shared standards, conducting joint pilots, and building multilingual foundation models trained on data from developing-world contexts rather than simply translating models developed elsewhere. Their emphasis on workforce transition and skills development is equally significant: adopting AI without developing local expertise risks relocating technological dependency rather than overcoming it.

The larger opportunity is to build an AI ecosystem in which the BRICS countries are not merely users of technologies developed elsewhere, but active contributors to their design, evaluation and governance. The science academies, by bringing researchers across disciplines and countries into sustained collaboration, can provide an institutional bridge between technological capability and the broader societal questions that AI inevitably raises.

The asymmetry problem

By pooling financial resources, research capacity and scientific talent, member states can reduce their dependence on intellectual property and technologies controlled elsewhere. Integration will not make BRICS countries immune to techno-nationalist pressure, but it can make coercion more costly and less effective by creating alternative sources of knowledge, technology and supply.

The stakes therefore extend well beyond scientific collaboration. If BRICS can make the transition from an alliance of economic convenience to a functioning scientific partnership, it will acquire not only greater technological autonomy but also greater influence over the rules by which emerging technologies are governed. Global governance will then have to negotiate with BRICS as a collective scientific and technological actor on terms much closer to parity than its members have historically enjoyed.