Accession Context
The UAE’s formal accession to BRICS on 1 January 2024 — alongside Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Iran — marked a significant expansion of the bloc from its original five members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and represented a deliberate strategic choice by Abu Dhabi. The decision to join was not a pivot away from Western partnerships but an expression of the UAE’s omnidirectional foreign policy doctrine: the pursuit of influence and economic access across all major geopolitical formations simultaneously.
The invitation to join BRICS came at the Johannesburg summit in August 2023, following several years of Emirati engagement with the bloc’s mechanisms, including the New Development Bank. For the UAE, BRICS offers a platform to deepen relationships with the world’s largest emerging economies, participate in reshaping global financial architecture, and access markets representing over 40 percent of the world’s population and approximately 30 percent of global GDP.
Economic Diversification Logic
BRICS membership aligns directly with the UAE’s economic diversification imperatives under the We the UAE 2031 framework. The bloc’s combined economies represent the UAE’s most significant growth markets outside the OECD. China and India are already the federation’s first and third largest trading partners respectively, while Brazil’s agricultural sector and South Africa’s mining industry present partnership opportunities in food security and resource diversification — both priority areas for Emirati strategic planning.
The New Development Bank, BRICS’s multilateral lending institution, offers the UAE an alternative channel for infrastructure finance and development cooperation that does not carry the conditionality frameworks associated with Western-led institutions like the World Bank and IMF. While the UAE is a capital provider rather than borrower, participation in the NDB gives Abu Dhabi influence over investment flows into emerging markets where it seeks to expand its economic footprint.
The bloc’s discussions on de-dollarisation and alternative payment systems are relevant to the UAE’s own efforts to diversify its currency exposures and develop its financial services sector. The federation has already established bilateral currency swap arrangements with China and India, and BRICS membership provides a multilateral framework to advance these alternative financial mechanisms.
Geopolitical Signalling
BRICS membership sends a calculated signal to the UAE’s Western partners: Abu Dhabi will not be confined to a single geopolitical camp, and its participation in emerging-power institutions is a structural feature of its foreign policy rather than a response to any specific grievance. This signalling is managed carefully to avoid provoking a negative response from Washington. The UAE emphasises that BRICS is an economic cooperation platform, not a military alliance, and that membership complements rather than contradicts its Western partnerships.
The inclusion of Iran in the same BRICS expansion presented a diplomatic complexity for the UAE. The two countries have a contested relationship shaped by territorial disputes over the Tunb Islands and Abu Musa, competing regional influence, and divergent security architectures. Sharing institutional space with Iran within BRICS requires diplomatic management but also creates channels for engagement that might otherwise be unavailable.
Institutional Engagement Strategy
The UAE’s approach to BRICS is characterised by selective engagement rather than ideological alignment. Abu Dhabi has no interest in the anti-Western rhetoric that some BRICS members employ, nor in the bloc’s occasional framing as a counterweight to the G7. Instead, the UAE treats BRICS as a practical platform for advancing specific economic and diplomatic objectives: market access, financial innovation, investment coordination, and the cultivation of relationships with rising powers.
This selective approach extends to the bloc’s governance reform agenda. While the UAE supports incremental reforms to international financial institutions that give greater voice to emerging economies, it has no interest in dismantling the existing international order from which it benefits enormously. Abu Dhabi’s BRICS engagement is additive — it seeks to layer new institutional relationships on top of existing Western partnerships rather than substituting one for the other.
Risk Assessment
The primary risk of BRICS membership is perception management. If Western partners interpret the UAE’s participation as a drift toward an anti-Western bloc, the political costs could outweigh the economic benefits. This risk is mitigated by the UAE’s continued deep engagement with Western institutions and the fact that several BRICS members — notably India and Brazil — maintain their own substantial Western partnerships.
A secondary risk is institutional dilution. The expansion of BRICS from five to ten or more members increases the bloc’s demographic and economic weight but also complicates decision-making and reduces coherence. If BRICS becomes a forum for rhetorical posturing rather than practical cooperation, its value to the UAE would diminish.
Strategic Outlook
BRICS membership reinforces the UAE’s positioning as a global connector state — a nation that participates in every major institutional framework without being defined by any single one. For the 2031 vision, the bloc provides a structured channel for deepening economic relationships with the world’s fastest-growing economies while maintaining the strategic flexibility that is the hallmark of Emirati foreign policy. The success of this approach will be measured not by the bloc’s collective achievements but by the bilateral opportunities that BRICS membership facilitates for Abu Dhabi.