The writer is assistant professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University and author of ‘Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg’
When leaders convened in Rio de Janeiro for the 2025 Brics summit, the bloc projected confidence: freshly expanded to 11 member states, it issued a 31-page declaration and renewed calls to reduce dollar dependency. But beneath this choreography of multi-polar ambition lies a structural divide that will determine how much strategic autonomy Brics countries can exercise.
That divide is not ideological but infrastructural. There is a growing split between electro-states (those building industrial capacity for clean energy technologies) and carbon states (those whose economic and political institutions remain deeply tied to fossil fuels). Energy systems both reflect and mobilise the political coalitions that govern national economies, and these coalitions shape national capacity to resist external economic coercion amid deepening global fragmentation.