Leaders or Loners? How Do the BRICS Countries and their Regions Vote in the UN General Assembly

Abstract

The so-called emerging powers, including the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), typically present themselves as natural leaders of their regions. Although physical size confers them the status of regional powers, their role as leaders depends on the consensual acceptance of their would-be followers. Can it be affirmed then that the countries under the influence of the BRICS show convergent positions? Can the five BRICS be considered de facto leaders of their regions? This article sets out to answer these questions by analysing the behaviour of the BRICS and their regional partners in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). The research design replicates the data from Voeten (2013) in order to compare the average affinity between each of the BRICS countries and their regions in the votes of the UNGA from 1992 to 2014. The data indicate a high level of regional cohesion for Brazil, China and South Africa when compared to Russia and India. The findings corroborate the literature in relation to Brazil and South Africa but conflict with what has been produced on the regional leadership of Russia, India and China.

Go Global or Go Home: Comparing the Regional vs. Global Engagement of Brazil and South Africa at the UN General Assembly

“…Scholarship on regionalism, regional powers and the UN has focused on varied aspects of this interplay, such as regional cohesion (Montenegro and Mesquita 2017), representation (Lai and Lefler 2017) and actorness (Seabra and Sanches 2019). Few studies, however, have paid close attention to the salience of regional themes on UN output, and even less resorted to metrics apart from roll-call votes.…”

“…Yet, previous work on Brazil and South Africa's profile at the UNGA has relied solely on data from voting records. Recent studies have focused on Brazil-US relations (Amorim Neto 2012), on Brazil-Africa connections as tokens of South-South solidarity (Seabra and Sanches 2019), the consistency of South Africa's track-record at the UNGA with its major foreign policy tenets (Graham 2016), or the performance of both states in contrast to other 20 BRICS countries in fostering regional cohesion (Montenegro and Mesquita 2017). No effort has been made so far towards exploring the possibilities that co-sponsorship of drafts at the UNGA entail.…”

South–South cohesiveness versus South–South rhetoric: Brazil and Africa at the UN General Assembly

“…On the one hand, the only study of the kind centred on South-South relations within the UNGA dates back to 1988 and exclusively concerns the Group of 77 (G77) (Iida 1988), thus leaving the field lacking a fresh take on the subject. On the other hand, recent studies have either focused on the cohesion of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) (Ferdinand 2014;Hooijmaaijers and Keukeleire 2016), on how such countries perceive their surrounding regions as stepping stones to global projection (Montenegro and Mesquita 2017), or on Brazil-US relations, as a way to historically explain the evolution of the former's foreign policy trajectory (Amorim Neto 2012). No attention has been paid to alternative high-politics formations, such as those heralded by Brazil and Africa in the background of the latest Global South élan.…”