Nigeria and BRICS+ : Cooperation, Constraints, and the Political Economy of Development in a Changing Global Order

This paper interrogates Nigeria’s emerging engagement with BRICS+ within the context of a changing global order, using a political economy framework to analyse the prospects, constraints, and development implications of this evolving South–South alignment. While BRICS+ is often framed in policy discourse as an alternative pole of development finance, trade, and geopolitical partnership, critical political economy scholarship cautions against treating such arrangements as either technically neutral or automatically developmental. Drawing on a dual-theoretical framework that integrates postcolonial political economy and structural political economy, the study argues that Nigeria’s engagement with BRICS+ is best understood as a historically conditioned and politically contested process shaped by global power asymmetries, domestic political settlements, and state capacity. Methodologically, the paper adopts a qualitative, interpretive political economy approach, relying on comparative-historical analysis and critical engagement with secondary sources to unpack the social relations, institutional constraints, and strategic interests embedded in Nigeria–BRICS+ cooperation. The analysis demonstrates that while BRICS+ engagement potentially widens Nigeria’s policy space and access to development finance, its developmental impact is neither automatic nor guaranteed. Outcomes depend on the character of Nigeria’s state institutions, the configuration of domestic elite coalitions, and the broader global political economy within which BRICS+ itself operates. The paper concludes that Nigeria–BRICS+ relations should be understood less as a technocratic solution to development challenges and more as a terrain of political struggle over accumulation, distribution, and strategic autonomy in the Global South.