Iran exposes the limits of BRICS unity

What is unfolding in Iran today is not merely another chapter in a long story of unrest. It is a stress test for the global order, for the credibility of emerging powers, and for the moral grammar of international diplomacy at a moment when multipolarity is no longer theoretical but painfully real.

Since late December 2025, Iran has been gripped by nationwide protests triggered by an economic freefall. The numbers alone are staggering. The rial collapsed to around 1.42 million to the US dollar. Inflation surged beyond 40 per cent. Basic commodities vanished from shelves. What began with strikes by shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar rapidly spread across all 31 provinces, morphing from economic anger into unmistakably political defiance. Chants no longer pleaded for relief but demanded an end to clerical rule. By mid-January 2026, human rights organisations and AP confirmed that at least 2000 civilians, including children, had been killed by security forces. Internet access was cut nationwide, a familiar signal of a state bracing for survival.

These protests are smaller than the 2022–23 ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ uprising, yet they may prove more destabilising. The reason lies in the economy. Iran’s unrest is now anchored in material despair rather than symbolic outrage. Power shortages, fuel price hikes, and the removal of subsidised exchange rates have hollowed out daily life. According to the Atlantic Council, Iran’s GDP growth lags far behind that of every other BRICS member, while inflation is the highest in the bloc. This is not the profile of a rising power. It is the anatomy of exhaustion.

And yet, this exhausted state now sits inside BRICS.

Iran’s accession in 2024 was celebrated in grand language about multipolarity and Global South solidarity. In reality, it was contentious from the outset. Reuters reported that India resisted admitting states under UN sanctions, while Brazil and South Africa worried about antagonising Western partners. Only China and Russia pushed unequivocally, seeing Iran as a strategic counterweight to US influence. That gamble now confronts reality.

BRICS is being forced to absorb not just Iran’s economy, but its internal crisis. This matters because BRICS has marketed itself as a more just alternative to Western-led governance, one grounded in development, dignity, and sovereignty. Silence in the face of lethal crackdowns risks hollowing out that claim. Loud condemnation risks fracturing the bloc. The dilemma is structural.

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China’s response has been telling. Beijing has urged ‘peace and stability’ while opposing any external intervention, a formulation that prioritises order above accountability. Russia has echoed sovereignty and condemned Western ‘meddling’, consistent with its own experiences of internal dissent. India, Brazil and South Africa have opted for studied restraint, calling for calm without addressing the gunfire. The divergence underscores a truth often obscured by BRICS communiqués: this is not a values-based coalition but a balancing act among incompatible political systems.

This isn’t just a regional flare-up — it should set off alarm bells from Canberra to Cape Town and Beijing to Brasília. It puts the world in a cruel light: brute power and paranoid geopolitics on one side, the fragile moral and legal rules that hold states to account on the other. Iran’s government insists the unrest is foreign-instigated. The narrative of siege is familiar and emotionally potent, especially in a country shaped by the 1953 foreign intelligence-backed coup and decades of sanctions. Yet international law is not silent on the use of lethal force against peaceful demonstrators. Iran is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented violations that cut directly against those obligations.

Here lies the deeper fracture. The post–Cold War order promised that economic integration and multilateral institutions would gradually align power with norms. The present moment suggests the opposite. Sanctions have crippled Iran’s economy without moderating its politics. Membership in a rising bloc has provided diplomatic cover without delivering stability at home. The result is a population squeezed between inflation and batons, while great powers argue about non-interference.

History offers uncomfortable parallels. The 1979 Iranian Revolution showed how quickly legitimacy can evaporate once bazaars turn against the state. The Arab Spring revealed how economic grievances mutate into existential challenges. Yet Iran is not Egypt or Tunisia. It is militarised, regionally embedded, and strategically shielded by Moscow and Beijing. Any external intervention would risk regional conflagration and oil market shock. Even rumours of escalation send prices upward, a reminder that Iran’s domestic crisis has global consequences.

The strategic implications are already visible. Iran’s security forces are stretched between internal repression and external deterrence. The so-called Axis of Resistance is weaker than at any point in the past decade. Hezbollah is constrained, Syria is fragile, and Tehran’s room for manoeuvre is narrowing. A miscalculation — an Israeli strike, an American threat, a proxy clash — could ignite escalation precisely when the regime is most brittle.

What, then, is left? The answer is unsatisfying but necessary: disciplined diplomacy anchored in realism, not illusions. Regime change from outside would be catastrophic. Indifference to bloodshed corrodes legitimacy. Targeted sanctions against individuals responsible for violence, combined with humanitarian and economic channels that bypass the state, remain among the few tools available. Forums such as the UN and BRICS itself should not be stages for platitudes but venues for quiet pressure and accountability.

US President Donald Trump declared that “help is on its way” to Iranian protesters and cancelled meetings with Tehran, warning of strong retaliation, a stance that has energised solidarity demonstrations outside US embassies from Sydney to London, even though Washington has not specified what form that assistance will take. In contrast, BRICS partners have refrained from directly commenting on Iran’s internal crackdown, focusing instead on diplomatic settlement and multilateral engagement, such as reaffirming peaceful resolution of regional conflicts and upholding international law in summit communiqués without endorsing intervention.

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This is the moment that will define BRICS: a moral stress test for an expanded multipolar order. Not a slogan, not a communiqué, but a live question of whether sovereignty can still coexist with human dignity when power is finally dispersed. Iran’s crisis is forcing that reckoning into the open. Accountability should land exactly where responsibility sits — on the command nodes that authorised unlawful force. Travel bans, asset freezes, and a short, independent forensic review would draw a clear line between consequence and collective punishment. 

The message would be unmistakable: repression carries a price, but civilians are not collateral.

At the same time, relief must move faster than rhetoric. Food, fuel, cash, and connectivity cannot be held hostage to politics. Neutral humanitarian bypass channels, facilitated through the ICRC or UN mechanisms, reinforced by BRICS-backed escrow and swap arrangements, can deliver lifelines directly to households while sidestepping state rent-seeking. This is not generosity. It is strategic compassion, stabilising lives before despair hardens into collapse.

Finally, pressure must be quiet but relentless. Not megaphone diplomacy, but disciplined engagement. Discreet envoys, paired with a light-touch BRICS–UN monitoring cell, could track verified indicators and offer private guidance calibrated to change behaviour without detonating the system. The goal is not humiliation or regime change. It is restraint, stability, and credibility for Iran, and for the bloc that now claims it.

Handled well, this becomes proof that multipolarity can mature. Handled badly, it confirms the darkest fear: that power has multiplied, but responsibility has not.

Iran’s crisis exposes the unfinished business of multipolarity. Power has diversified; norms have not. BRICS can either become a shield for repression or a laboratory for responsible sovereignty. The choice will shape how the Global South is perceived — not as an abstract constituency, but as a moral actor in world politics.

For Iran’s citizens, the stakes are painfully immediate: dignity, bread, and the right to speak without being shot. For the international system, the stakes are structural. If emerging powers cannot reconcile stability with humanity, the promise of a fairer order will ring hollow. This is not merely Iran’s reckoning. It is a reckoning for a world learning, once again, that economics, legitimacy, and power cannot be separated without consequence.

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