Beyond widening and deepening?: BRICS security narrative revisionism and its limits

Security studies, as a subdiscipline of International Relations (IR), has inherited Eurocentric paradigms that often universalise Western historical experiences while marginalising perspectives from the Global South. Although post-Cold War debates widened and deepened the concept of security to encompass human development, health, climate change, and other non-military concerns, these frameworks can still reproduce Western priorities and interventionist assumptions. This article examines the 2024 Kazan and 2025 Rio de Janeiro BRICS summit declarations to ask two related questions: how does BRICS rearticulate security through postcolonial grammar, and to what extent does this official narrative extend beyond declaration-level rhetoric? Using an interpretive reading of the two declarations, supplemented by selected indicators of institutionalisation and behavioural convergence, the article argues that BRICS articulates an emerging security narrative organized around sovereignty, equity, development, local ownership, and resistance to unilateral coercion. The evidence is strongest at the level of discourse and agenda-setting, partial at the level of institutionalisation, and uneven at the level of member-state behaviour. BRICS security discourse is therefore best understood as emerging narrative revisionism with institutional potential, rather than as a fully consolidated or consistently implemented postcolonial security paradigm.