The rise in international tension has triggered an important discussion among BRICS countries about academic sovereignty and the steps that would be required to contribute to accumulating scientific prestige of leading non-Western countries on the global stage. Andrei Cherkasskiy, Acting Director of the Institute of International Relations of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI, sees, in the structure of this group, both factors that hinder “dewesternization” of science and compelling signs of academic policy integration among BRICS countries gaining momentum.
Since signing two documents in 2015 determining the strategic frameworks for cooperation between BRICS countries in the fields of science, technology, and innovation (STI): a Memorandum of Understanding and corresponding Framework Programme, the situation in the world and the BRICS union itself have changed significantly.
One year after launching the special military operation, Russia became the most sanctioned country in the world, surpassing Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Given Russia’s significance as an oil and gas exporter, sanctions by the so-called collective West reshaped the global energy market. The collapse of long-term contracts and supply chains led to price volatility, supply shortage risks, and advancement of ambitious but not entirely economically justified Green agenda in EU countries.
Simultaneously, use of the US dollar and its financial infrastructure as a sanctions tool limited the currency’s use in international trade and triggered renewed discussion of the utopian idea of returning to the gold standard.
According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) data, defense expenditures worldwide rose so much that they broke record levels set during the Cold War. Governments’ increased focus on security has also stimulated greater attention to national science. After two rounds of expansion, adding Egypt, Iran, the UAE, and Ethiopia to the original five in 2024, and bringing in Indonesia in 2025 to turn the dialogue format into a “BRICS 10”, BRICS has surpassed the G7 potential. This has naturally elevated the importance of national scientific and technological institutions for the member states.
For Russia, this was reflected in adoption of the Technological Development Concept through 2030 (May 2023), which introduced the idea of technological sovereignty. The goal of achieving this was later cemented in the updated Science and Technology Development Strategy adopted in February 2024.
It is emphasized on all available platforms that technological sovereignty does not mean isolation but rather a conscious choice and diversification of partners.
It is expected that science and technology development, while not rapidly eliminating economic inequality between the West and the Rest, will at least raise the prestige of leading non-Western countries globally. It seems inevitable that the BRICS countries will unite their efforts in this field. Yet what is the actual pace of “dewesternization” of science in the BRICS+ space? May we already say that the BRICS+ platform allows Russia to respond effectively to the Western campaign to isolate it scientifically?
The latter question can be answered in part by identifying which foreign scientific schools collaborate with scientists from Russia’s BRICS partner countries. The first domestic study addressing this issue was conducted jointly, in 2024(1), by the Institute of International Relations of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI and the Laboratory of Intelligent Data Analysis at the IIS MGIMO.
Experts analyzed under whose jurisdiction scientific and educational organizations fall where high-ranking researchers worked before entering into contractual arrangements with universities of Russia’s BRICS partner countries. Unfortunately, only Brazil has Russia-trained researchers among its academic elite. India and China are more prominent than Russia in terms of talent exports.
The key donors of scientific expertise to BRICS+ countries remain the United States and the broader Western scientific community. The comparative scientific potential of the West is declining more slowly than its relative economic power. Owing to the inertia of scientific development and the inherently international nature of science, this situation is likely to persist. Researchers in BRICS countries understand clearly the correlation between foreign experience and a higher h-index(2), but foreign experience varies in quality. The Soviet-era saying “a chicken is not a bird, and Bulgaria is not abroad” describing travel to socialist countries finds new relevance in the academic sphere: BRICS is not ‘abroad’.
This means that, while Russia’s BRICS partners continue building scientific ties with Western centres, in the medium term Russia will remain isolated from them. While Russian science has sufficient potential to overcome this isolation in time, additional efforts are needed to expand joint scientific and technological projects through the BRICS+ platform, rather than relying on just bilateral contacts.
Negative factors still include uneven STI development among BRICS+ countries, with China evidently in the lead; language barriers and visa restrictions between member states; lack of interstate agreements recognizing mutual equivalence of education credentials.
Examples of academic integration within BRICS include the BRICS+ League of Foundations for Science and Education, and Fudan University’s BRICS Summer Programme. Even so, these initiatives prioritize hard sciences, focusing on industrial technologies, robotics, renewable energy, and climate change. Despite promising projects and some shared experience, researchers in BRICS countries still face difficulties in creating intellectual alliances in the humanities and social sciences.
In conclusion, weak ties within BRICS+, inadequate coordination of cooperation priorities and lack of information exchange about national scientific and innovation systems hinder the development of research agenda geared toward dewesternization. Without policies promoting South– South partnerships, the concept of “dewesternization” risks becoming an empty category co-opted by the academic agenda of the Global North. Unsurprisingly, the authors of the study “Geographical Disparities in Knowledge Production: A Big Data Analysis of Peer-Reviewed Communication Research, 1990–2019” argue that Global North scholars writing about the Global South often attract more attention than Global South researchers’ publications about their own regions in lower-ranked journals (3). Neoliberal globalization and the logic of academic capitalism characterized by awarding symbolic bonuses exclusively to scientific collectives aligning themselves with the values espoused by northern think tanks perpetuates asymmetry in academic research.
A cosmopolitan approach to science should encompass three dimensions: an institutional one aimed at facilitating creation of transfer-of-technology centres between priority areas of cooperation; an academic one oriented on forming a common citation base avoiding labeling topics as “unpromising” if they do not conform to the hegemonic agenda of Western think tanks; and an educational dimension promoting scientific exchanges, international summer/ winter schools at various levels.
A good example of the “small deeds” approach at the educational level is the BRICS Summer School held in Armenia in July 2025. Organized by the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Gorchakov Fund, with support from UWC Dilijan, it was a unique international boarding school and the first in Eastern Europe and the CIS to join the United World Colleges network. The school brought together over 20 young professionals, including participants from BRICS countries, once again proving that no obstacle is insurmountable for scientific dialogue.
1 Import of Personnel? Career Trajectories of BRICS Countries’ Scholars / N.Yu. Silaev, R.R. Tukumbetova, M.S. Ulizko. Moscow: MGIMO Publishing House, 2024. p. 26.
2 h-index – a scientometric indicator characterizing productivity of individual scientists or groups of scientists, institutions or entire countries based on publication count and citations received.
3 Ekdale B., Rinaldi A., Ashfaquzzaman M., Khanjani M., Matanji F., Stoldt R., Tully M. (2022). Geographic Disparities in Knowledge Production: A Big Data Analysis of Peer-Reviewed Communication Publications from 1990 to 2019. International Journal of Communication, 16(28), 2498–2525. https://ijoc.org/ index.php/ijoc/article/view/18386.
