[News] When the Empire Chokes, the South Breathes

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mronline.org
<https://mronline.org/2025/08/18/when-the-empire-chokes-the-south-breathes/>
When the Empire Chokes, the South Breathes | MR Online
Prince Kapone
August 18, 2025
------------------------------
*BRICS+ is contradictory, uneven, and fragile—but in its openings, the
Global South carves space for sovereignty and struggle* Multipolarity
Emerges from Crisis, Not Consensus

The story they sell is that “order” was built by reasoned men in sensible
suits. The story we live is different. Multipolarity did not grow out of
seminars or summits; it is the aftershock of five centuries of plunder, the
recoil from wars and sanctions, and the refusal of the colonized to keep
paying for someone else’s civilization. Its genealogy runs from the Bandung
Communiqué (1955)
<https://www.aalco.int/Basicdocuments/FINAL%20COMMUNIQU%C3%89%20OF%20THE%20ASIAN-AFRICAN%20CONFERENCE.pdf>—the
first great gathering where the majority of humanity spoke in its own
name—through the long detour of debt, structural adjustment, and
counter-insurgency masquerading as “development.”

Bandung’s promise was simple and subversive: sovereignty, peaceful
coexistence, cooperation, and a say in the world economy for those who
actually make the world economy run. You can read that promise in
black-and-white in the text of the communiqué
<https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/final_communique_of_the_asian_african_conference_of_bandung_24_april_1955-en-676237bd-72f7-471f-949a-88b6ae513585.html>,
a document that still sounds radical because the same empires are still
offended by the same words. Tricontinental’s recent dossier, The Bandung
Spirit (2025) <https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-the-bandung-spirit/>,
shows that this was not etiquette—it was a working program for
decolonization from below.

The response from the imperial core was to tighten the screws. By 1975, the
Trilateral Commission was diagnosing the real problem as “too much
democracy,” a frank admission in *The Crisis of Democracy*
<https://ia801308.us.archive.org/23/items/TheCrisisOfDemocracy-TrilateralCommission-1975/crisis_of_democracy_text.pdf>
that popular participation had to be disciplined to restore elite control.
Soon after came the debt whip and structural adjustment: privatize the
commons, slash public goods, open the veins to capital, call it
modernization. Even the UN family’s own record describes how these adjustment
programs were bolted to lending
<https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/ldc00_ch4.en.pdf>, how
they demanded austerity as a price of credit
<https://desapublications.un.org/policy-briefs/un-desa-policy-brief-no-179-first-second-world-summit-social-development-reclaiming>,
and how human-rights bodies have warned for years that such “reforms” undermine
rights and social protection
<https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/ie-foreign-debt/about-human-rights-and-foreign-debt>.
The academic literature has filled in the human cost: structural adjustment
correlates withweaker health systems and higher infant deaths
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953619304897>. In
other words, recolonization by spreadsheet.

Then the mask slipped. The 2008 crash—made in the metropole, exported to
everyone—made a mockery of sermons about “sound finance.” UNCTAD’s Trade
and Development Report (2009)
<https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/tdr2009_en.pdf> and
its chapter
on developing countries
<https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/tdr2009ch3_en.pdf>
documented how the South paid a “heavy price” for a crisis born at the
center. The lesson was absorbed: if the rules are rigged to socialize Wall
Street’s losses and privatize the South’s future, the South must change the
rules—or leave the game.

That is the soil from which BRICS sprouted—not as utopia, but as refusal.
Over time the bloc has widened into BRICS+, adding new members and partners
as states seek room to breathe outside the dollar leash. The most recent
wave is not rumor but record: on 1 January 2024, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and
the UAE entered as full members, and in January 2025 Brazil announced
Indonesia’s accession
<https://www.gov.br/mre/en/contact-us/press-area/press-releases/indonesia-as-a-new-member-of-brics>,
echoed by China’s Foreign Ministry
<https://www.mfa.gov.cn/eng/xw/fyrbt/202501/t20250106_11527794.html> and
corroborated by independent reporting
<https://www.reuters.com/world/indonesia-join-brics-bloc-full-member-brazil-says-2025-01-06/>.
None of this makes BRICS+ socialist; it makes it *useful*—a contested space
where the monopoly of imperial management is breaking. For a sober Global
South view of what’s actually moving (and what isn’t), see the South
Centre’s analysis on de-dollarization debates within BRICS
<https://www.southcentre.int/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/SV280_241217.pdf>.

Multipolarity is not a slogan; it is a material counter-tendency. You can
watch it in the world’s infrastructure and payment pipes. Ethiopia’s
sea-lifeline now runs on the electrified Addis–Djibouti railway
<https://www.railway-technology.com/projects/ethiopia-djibouti-railway-line-modernisation/>,
a concrete part of the South–South artery that planners in Washington never
intended to exist. Across the continent, Africa’s cross-border payments
platform is cutting hard-currency costs and chipping at dollar
habit—precisely the sort of technically “boring” shift that changes
political weather.

Does multipolarity guarantee emancipation? Of course not. As Tricontinental
puts it in plain language, the task is to move from de-risking to genuine
sovereignty
<https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2024-1-derisking-dedollarisation-brics-currency/>,
not to swap one master for several managers. But history’s hinge is
audible. Bandung named the principles; neoliberalism punished those who
tried to live by them; the crash exposed the hypocrisy; BRICS+ is the crack
where history breathes. Our wager—grounded in the archives, in the data,
and in the memory of struggle—is that this crack can be widened by
organized people, not just negotiated by states.
Fault Lines and Frontiers within BRICS+

The pundits in New York and London keep describing BRICS+ as if it were a
single beast, a kind of “emerging market” hydra with ten heads. That’s a
convenient fiction. The reality is far more fractured: a coalition stitched
together by shared antagonism to unipolar power, but riddled with distinct
motives and trajectories. To see this bloc clearly, we need a cartography
of its types, not as an academic exercise but as a guide to where the
contradictions lie.
Start with the *Sanctioned Resisters*. Iran
<https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/06/fincen-advisory-highlights-iran-sanctions-evasion-red-flags>
has endured four decades of economic siege, building parallel trade systems
and oil-export routes despite Washington’s attempt to suffocate it. UN
human rights experts <https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/12/1131887> call
these sanctions what they are: collective punishment, weaponized hunger.
Belarus
<https://www.eurasiareview.com/27052025-belarus-2025-eurasia-an-arena-of-emerging-strategic-partnerships-analysis/>,
under European embargo, has responded by joining the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization in 2024, deepening its Eurasian turn. These states bring to
BRICS+ an intimate knowledge of survival under imperial blockade.Then come
the *Chokepoint States*, perched on arteries of global trade. Egypt’s Suez
Canal moves roughly 12% of world commerce
<https://www.suezcanal.gov.eg/English/Navigation/Pages/NavigationStatistics.aspx>.
Ethiopia, though landlocked, is tethered to the sea through the
Chinese-built Addis–Djibouti railway
<https://www.railway-technology.com/projects/ethiopia-djibouti-railway-line-modernisation/>,
a Belt and Road artery. Indonesia formally joined BRICS in January 2025
<https://www.gov.br/mre/en/contact-us/press-area/press-releases/indonesia-as-a-new-member-of-brics>,
with China’s Foreign Ministry affirming its membership
<https://www.mfa.gov.cn/eng/xw/fyrbt/202501/t20250106_11527794.html>,
and independent
reporting corroborating the accession
<https://www.reuters.com/world/indonesia-join-brics-bloc-full-member-brazil-says-2025-01-06/>.
It controls the Strait of Malacca and the flow of global nickel, the
mineral of the energy transition. Nigeria, still listed as an OPEC
heavyweight <https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/167.htm>, is locked
in the paradox of oil wealth and IMF-driven austerity. The UAE, another new
entrant, sits astride Gulf shipping lanes and finance. None of these states
are ideologically anti-imperialist, but each introduces leverage points
that erode the monopoly of US and NATO control over circulation.Next are
the *Swing States of Sub-Imperialism*: Brazil, India, and South Africa.
Their ruling classes want autonomy from Washington but also jealously guard
their regional spheres, often reproducing the very imperial logic they
claim to resist. Brazil’s BRICS Policy Center
<https://bricspolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/BRICS-Analysis-compactado.pdf>
and Morocco’s Policy Center for the New South
<https://www.policycenter.ma/publications/brics-new-framework-new-south-inclusiveness>
underline the ambivalence: sovereignty without socialism, influence without
transformation. India trades rupees with Russia while joining US naval
exercises in the Indo-Pacific. Brazil’s agribusiness barons sell soy to
China while aligning with the IMF on fiscal targets. South Africa plays
mediator on Ukraine even as its elites deepen mining capital’s grip.Then
there is the *Socialist Pole-in-the-Making*. China, with its Belt and Road
steel arteries and vast financial reserves, and Russia, with its
hydrocarbons and military deterrent, are the indispensable anchors. Without
them, BRICS would be acronym soup. With them, BRICS+ becomes both a shield
and a snare: a shelter for sanctioned states and a platform for sovereign
maneuver, but also a bloc where capitalist logics are alive and well and in
Russia dominant, though shaken by the war. Their presence is the condition
of possibility—and the central contradiction—of the entire project.Finally,
the *Partner Orbit*. In July 2025, Vietnam accepted BRICS’ invitation to
join as a partner country
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/07/04/brics-vietnam-expands-56-world-population-44-gdp/>,
alongside Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand,
Uganda, and Uzbekistan. This brought the BRICS “20” to life: ten members
and ten partners, representing 56% of humanity and 44% of global GDP (PPP).
Vietnam’s accession is more than a statistic. It signals the persistence of
non-alignment—the “Four Nos” Hanoi proclaims: no alliances, no siding
against another country, no foreign bases, no use of force. In an era when
Washington seeks to turn Vietnam into a pawn against China, Hanoi instead
joins a bloc that includes Beijing. That is multipolar maneuver, not
capitulation. BRICS+ is not a socialist project. But Cuba’s inclusion
changes the geometry. It brings not just a voice, but a vanguard: a living
memory of revolution and an unbroken tradition of anti-imperial struggle.
Its presence injects political clarity and historical depth into a bloc too
often pulled toward elite interests and bourgeois nationalism. Cuba reminds
the bloc that the Global South doesn’t just need sovereignty–it needs
emancipation.

Typologies like these are not crystal balls. They are maps of a
battlefield. Revolutionary rhetoric sits next to sub-imperial practice,
sanctioned grit next to petro-dollars. What unites BRICS+ is not a coherent
ideology but the cracks in empire’s edifice. It is in those cracks that the
Global South experiments with breathing space—and where movements may yet
find leverage to widen the rupture.
The Shared Terrain of Contradiction

Strip away the acronyms and summit speeches and what remains is stark: the
only thing that unites BRICS+ is a common predicament. Each state arrives
carrying its own scars. Decades of IMF-imposed austerity
<https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/ldc00_ch4.en.pdf> have
hollowed public services, leaving debts that can never be repaid. Human
rights bodies warn these adjustment programs violate basic rights
<https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/ie-foreign-debt/about-human-rights-and-foreign-debt>,
but the creditors continue to tighten the screws. The Global South’s
predicament is not abstract; it is the lived experience of fragile health
systems and preventable deaths
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953619304897>, a
permanent crisis manufactured in Washington and Brussels.

Sanctions are the other instrument of discipline. UN experts have
repeatedly condemned unilateral sanctions as collective punishment. Iran
has paid the price in blocked medicines, Cuba in strangled remittances,
Russia in frozen assets. Every sanctioned state that joins BRICS+ carries
both the memory and the know-how of navigating around this economic
warfare—through barter, local currencies, or parallel payment systems.
<https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/08/1097562>

Geography compounds the pressure.
<https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/08/1097562>Egypt’s canal
<https://www.dw.com/en/suez-canal-blockage-4-of-the-biggest-trade-chokepoints/a-57020755>,
Ethiopia’s railway corridor
<https://hornreview.org/2025/08/12/tracks-of-integration-ethiopias-railways-and-the-politics-of-transnational-connectivity/>,
Indonesia’s straits
<https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/gallipoli-strait-malacca-why-maritime-choke-points-still-decide-fate-nations>,
Nigeria’s oil infrastructure
<https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/nigerias-trans-niger-oil-pipeline-bursts-spills-crude-rights-group-says-2025-05-15/?utm_source=chatgpt.com>—pipelines,
terminals, and the Gulf of Guinea—these are lifelines long policed by
Western capital. Now those same corridors are being repositioned under
multipolar conditions, even as AFRICOM expands bases and NATO
“partnerships” creep across the Global South. The battlefield is not just
in parliaments or palaces but in ports, pipelines, and fiber-optic cables.

Nor should we overlook the domestic dimension: every BRICS+ state faces
crises of legitimacy at home. Rising inequality in Brazil, farmer revolts
in India, energy shortages in South Africa, the grinding weight of debt in
Egypt and Nigeria. These are not contradictions that disappear inside
multipolar banners; they are baked into the bloc. As Tricontinental reminds
us <https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-the-bandung-spirit/>, ruling
classes maneuver to survive, but maneuver can produce openings for rupture
when popular forces intervene.

These contradictions are not a bug, but the very compass of the present. As
I have argued elsewhere, multipolar states must rely on the masses to
survive, but many are led by classes that fear those same masses
<https://weaponizedinformation.wordpress.com/2025/07/04/the-contradiction-is-the-compass-empire-multipolarity-and-the-revolutionary-horizon/>.
They are compelled to distribute enough to maintain loyalty, but not enough
to empower transformation. This tension is unstable, and under imperial
siege, it can either break open into deeper sovereignty —or collapse back
into dependency.

This is why BRICS+ cannot be read as an ideology, only as a terrain. It is
not Bandung reborn, but it does echo Bandung’s challenge: to refuse the
monopoly of imperial management. Its contradictions are its essence. The
bloc is stitched together by necessity, not unity. And necessity, as Marx
reminded us, is the midwife of history.
Empire’s Counterinsurgency against Multipolarity

Empire does not retreat politely; it sabotages. As BRICS+ enlarges its
footprint, Washington and its allies double down on disruption. AFRICOM has
extended its reach across the continent
<https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-42-militarisation-africa/>,
stitching a web of bases from the Sahel to the Horn, ensuring that every
port or pipeline can be surveilled or struck. In Asia, the so-called
Indo-Pacific
Strategy
<https://monthlyreview.org/2024/07/01/changes-in-u-s-grand-strategy-in-the-indo-pacific-and-chinas-countermeasures>
is less about “freedom of navigation” than about militarizing China’s
periphery and constraining new partners like Indonesia and Vietnam. In
Latin America, sanctions regimes and covert operations remain the preferred
instruments of “diplomacy.”
Financial war accompanies the military one. The US Federal Reserve wields
interest rates as weapons
<https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/openmarket.htm>, provoking
debt crises across the South and forcing austerity packages that unravel
sovereignty. When Ethiopia announced in 2023 that it would default on its
Eurobond, it was not a domestic failure but the predictable outcome of
global monetary tightening. Every BRICS+ state faces this squeeze in some
form: capital flight, currency volatility, weaponized ratings
agencies.Information war is no less aggressive. The same media outlets that
sold the invasion of Iraq now flood the wires with stories of
“authoritarian China,” “expansionist Russia,” and “unstable BRICS.” The US
State Department’s Global Engagement Center
<https://www.state.gov/global-engagement-center/> openly describes its
mission as “countering disinformation,” which in practice means
discrediting any Global South narrative that challenges the empire’s
script. The goal is to delegitimize multipolar experiments before they
consolidate.And then there is sabotage by co-optation. The dollar system is
not being defended only with bombs and sanctions; it is defended by drawing
“swing states” back into Washington’s orbit with promises of investment,
trade deals, or security pacts. India is courted as a counterweight to
China. Brazil’s elites are offered IMF approval in exchange for fiscal
discipline. South Africa is cajoled with G7 invitations. The empire knows
that if it can fracture the bloc from within, it can neutralize it without
firing a shot.To mistake BRICS+ as an unstoppable juggernaut is to
misunderstand both its fragility and the ruthlessness of its opponent.
Every advance—be it a local-currency swap, a new logistics corridor, or a
summit declaration—will be met with counter-moves: coups in Africa, proxy
wars in West Asia, debt traps in Latin America, information blitzes
everywhere. This is how hegemony behaves when cornered. The question is not
whether empire will fight back; it is whether movements across the South
can transform elite maneuver into popular rupture, so that sabotage turns
into boomerang. From De-Dollarization to Alternative Infrastructures

Empire’s most insidious weapon is not the aircraft carrier but the clearing
house. The US dollar remains the lubricant of world trade, and Washington’s
ability to freeze reserves or block transactions through SWIFT amounts to a
global veto. It is no accident that nearly every BRICS+ communiqué mentions
finance. South Centre’s December 2024 bulletin
<https://www.southcentre.int/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/SV280_241217.pdf>
documents the growing drive to settle trade in local currencies, a
pragmatic form of de-dollarization already practiced between India and
Russia, Brazil and China, Iran and anyone willing to trade through barter
or yuan. Each deal chips at the monopoly.
Institutions are being built to carry this shift. The New Development Bank
<https://www.ndb.int/>, headquartered in Shanghai, lends in local
currencies to reduce dependence on the IMF’s austerity scripts. The
Pan-African Payment and Settlement System <https://www.pabafrica.org/>
(PAPSS) enables cross-border trade in African currencies, bypassing the
dollar habit that drains $5 billion annually in conversion costs. The
ambition is clear: create infrastructures that allow the South to trade,
invest, and build without asking permission from Washington or
Brussels.Technology is a crucial front. The Addis–Djibouti railway
<https://www.railway-technology.com/projects/ethiopia-djibouti-railway-line-modernisation/>,
Jakarta–Bandung high-speed rail
<https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202310/1299835.shtml>, and Russia–China
Power of Siberia pipelines
<https://english.news.cn/20231229/528f6f8f694b42bfa6aa0dfdb40b5d0a/c.html>
are not just infrastructure—they are arteries of multipolar life. They knit
together regions in ways that bypass imperial chokepoints. Digital payments
matter too: China’s CIPS clearing system, Russia’s SPFS, and India’s UPI
are embryonic alternatives to SWIFT. Even “boring” systems like PAPSS
<https://www.tralac.org/documents/resources/cfta/5298-papss-brochure-en/file.html>
represent revolutionary shifts when seen against centuries of dollar
hegemony.But de-dollarization is no magic wand. Tricontinental warns
<https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2024-1-derisking-dedollarisation-brics-currency/>
that “derisking” is often just neoliberal code for hedging, not
emancipation. If elites use local-currency swaps to protect profits while
cutting social spending at home, nothing has changed. The risk is swapping
one master’s currency for another’s while leaving the debt relations
intact. Multipolarity only becomes emancipatory when financial sovereignty
is paired with popular sovereignty.Still, cracks in the dollar wall are
widening. When Argentina paid for Chinese imports in yuan in 2023, when
Saudi Arabia signaled willingness to sell oil outside the dollar in 2024,
when BRICS+ summits repeatedly float the idea of a shared currency unit,
the taboo is broken. No one action will dethrone the dollar, but each new
pipeline, payment system, and swap line makes it harder for Washington to
flip the kill switch. Multipolarity lives not in communiqués but in these
alternative infrastructures, built quietly, contested fiercely, and
pointing toward a world where empire’s veto no longer rules by default. The
Digital Silk Road and the Battle for Tech Sovereignty

Multipolarity is not just fought on the ground of oil pipelines or debt
swaps. Increasingly, it is waged in the invisible currents of fiber optics,
satellites, and code. BRICS’ Digital Silk Road (DSR)
<https://bricstoday.com/the-digital-silk-road-cybersecurity-and-tech-alliances-in-the-brics-bloc/>
represents one of the bloc’s most audacious projects: a deliberate attempt
to build a secure and self-reliant digital ecosystem, free from Western
chokeholds. Where the United States once monopolized not only finance but
the internet’s backbone, BRICS now lays its own cable, launches its own
satellites, and codes its own cloud.
The proposed BRICS-exclusive fiber-optic cable
<https://www.telecompaper.com/news/brics-nations-plan-undersea-communication-cables--1541703>
would directly link member states
<https://www.subseacables.net/industry-news/brazil-reignites-brics-submarine-cable-project-with-2025-feasibility-study-proposal/>,
reducing reliance on Western-controlled backbones
<https://jpia.princeton.edu/news/leveraging-submarine-cables-political-gain-us-responses-chinese-strategy>
and guarding against surveillance
<https://jsis.washington.edu/news/reactions-u-s-cybersecurity-policy-bric-undersea-cable/>.Meanwhile,
5G rollouts spearheaded by Huawei in China
<https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/20230612-19-huawei-wins-over-half-of-chinas-biggest-5g-base-station-tender-in-2023>
and partners in Brazil
<https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/brazil-regulator-approves-5g-spectrum-auction-rules-no-huawei-ban-2021-02-26/>
and Russia
<https://www.reuters.com/article/huawei-tech-russia-mts/russias-mts-and-chinas-huawei-sign-agreement-on-5g-idUSR4N23602B/>
have survived sanctions and bans
<https://ecipe.org/publications/how-huawei-weathered-the-storm-resilience-market-conditions-or-failed-sanctions/>,
extending into the heart of Global South cities
<https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/telefonica-ditches-huaweis-5g-gear-spain-germany-keeps-it-brazil-2025-07-30/>.
By contrast, India excluded Chinese vendors from 5G trials
<https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-concerned-its-companies-barred-5g-trials-india-2021-05-05/>
and rolled out 5G with non-Chinese vendors
<https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/indias-bharti-airtel-signs-multi-billion-dollar-4g-5g-equipment-deal-with-2024-12-04/>
.Russia’s GLONASS <https://glonass-iac.ru/en/sostavOG/> and China’s BeiDou
<https://en.beidou.gov.cn/SYSTEMS/System/> navigation systems, once seen as
redundant to US GPS
<https://www.unoosa.org/documents/pdf/icg/2025/Extracts_from_the_ICG_Reports_edited_20-01-2025.pdf>,
now form pillars of a multipolar satellite grid
<https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3165924/chinas-beidou-and-russian-glonass-sign-new-deal-rival-americas>.Cybersecurity
is being collectivized. The formation of a BRICS Cybersecurity Working
Group signals that threat intelligence will be shared in real time, with
AI-driven defenses deployed across borders
<https://bricstoday.com/the-digital-silk-road-cybersecurity-and-tech-alliances-in-the-brics-bloc/>.
At the same time, financial sovereignty is being re-imagined: China pushes
the digital yuan, while Russia and Brazil explore central bank digital
currencies. A blockchain-based BRICS payment system
<https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/03/27/brics-game-changing-blockchain-payment-system-the-future-of-global-transactions/>,
once dismissed as fantasy, now looks like a plausible bypass to SWIFT.But
perhaps the most radical current runs through research and development.
Joint ventures in semiconductors and quantum computing
<https://bricstoday.com/the-brics-quantum-communications-network/> aim to
erode one of the West’s last monopolies: control of the chip. Open-source
AI collaborations, spanning sectors from health technology to smart cities
<https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.04068>, promise not only cheaper tools but
also *different
values* embedded in the code. Analysts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative
emphasize that the Digital Silk Road
<https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/article/digital-silk-road-between-national-rhetoric-and-provincial-ambitions/CDA1C0AADBE36F2E164F599C8C3ABB49?utm_source=chatgpt.com>
is not just wires and servers but an attempt to shape technological
standards, regulatory models, and even the narratives that flow across
them. In this sense, the DSR has become a strategic infrastructure for
digital and narrative autonomy
<https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/files/2021-10/Digital_Silk_Road_Report_2021.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com>
in much of the Global South.

To empire, this is a nightmare scenario: a world where the South not only
trades outside the dollar but also communicates, stores data, and secures
networks without passing through Silicon Valley or the Pentagon’s kill
switch. To movements, it is an opening. The task is to ensure these digital
tools serve liberation, not simply new elites. For in the twenty-first
century, sovereignty without digital sovereignty is no sovereignty at all.
Weaponizing Information, Widening the Crack

If multipolarity is a battlefield, then information is one of its sharpest
weapons. Empire’s think tanks, from the Atlantic Council to Chatham House,
publish daily broadsides about the “dangers” of BRICS+. Their goal is to
frame the bloc as illegitimate before it even coheres. But the Global South
has its own arsenal. Tricontinental Institute for Social Research
<https://thetricontinental.org/>, Geopolitical Economy Report
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/>, Peoples Dispatch
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/>, and dozens of other platforms are producing
rigorous, accessible counter-narratives. This is not propaganda; it is
survival. To see clearly is to fight effectively.
Movements have long known that “who controls the story controls the
struggle.” During the Cold War, Washington used “development economics” to
justify recolonization through debt. Today, it uses buzzwords like
“friendshoring” and “de-risking” to mask supply-chain warfare. Vietnam’s
refusal to be a pawn in this narrative war—joining BRICS+ while Washington
sought to pit it against China—shows the power of narrative sovereignty.
Hanoi insisted on its own voice, rooted in its “Four Nos” doctrine of
non-alignment, and that act reverberated globally.And now, this is no
longer the work of isolated outlets. In July 2025, more than 220
communicators from 50 countries launched the Journalists’ Alliance for
Communication of the Global South in Caracas
<https://dailynewsegypt.com/2025/07/31/global-south-media-alliance-launched-in-caracas-to-counter-western-narratives/>,
declaring a permanent front to counter Western media dominance and defend
truth as a right of the people. The final declaration was unambiguous:
“Peoples have the right to the truth. To live it, to tell it and to know
it.” From Venezuela’s foreign minister to South African and Chinese
delegates, voices converged on the need for “informational sovereignty” and
“sovereign digital tools” to break algorithmic control. In other words: a
new international information order, crafted by the oppressed
themselves.Weaponized information must come from below as well as above. It
is not enough for ministries and presidents to issue statements; the
working class, peasants, and youth must be able to read, argue, and imagine
alternatives. That means research centers translating IMF jargon into plain
speech, trade unions understanding how payment systems affect wages,
farmers knowing how sanctions distort food prices. Every fact clarified is
a bullet of clarity against the fog of empire.This is why multipolarity is
both an opportunity and a responsibility. The opportunity: cracks in
empire’s narrative monopoly allow alternative media and research to reach
audiences hungry for truth. The responsibility: to avoid romanticizing
BRICS+ as savior, and instead to insist that its contradictions be exposed
and contested. The bloc is not a guarantee of emancipation—it is a site of
struggle. As with the de-dollarization experiments, narrative work can turn
elite maneuver into mass leverage.In the end, information is not an
accessory to power; it is power. When empire loses its grip on the story,
it loses its aura of inevitability. And when people believe the world can
be different, they begin to make it so. This is the essence of weaponized
information: not lies to mirror empire’s lies, but clarity sharpened into a
weapon, wielded by those who refuse to bow to inevitability. In that sense,
every essay, every dossier, every alliance of journalists like those who
gathered in Caracas is part of the same insurgency—the long war of ideas
that makes the short wars of liberation possible. Conclusion: Cracks in the
Wall, Roads Still to Build

BRICS+ is neither the socialist horizon nor a new Non-Aligned Movement. It
is a bloc of states maneuvering within the wreckage of US unipolarity, held
together less by principle than by necessity. Yet necessity matters. With
twenty members and partners now representing over half of humanity and
nearly half the world’s GDP, BRICS+ demonstrates that empire’s veto is no
longer absolute. That crack in the wall—however messy—is itself historic.
The danger is obvious: multipolarity without movements will consolidate
into a cartel of compradors, swapping dollars for yuan while keeping
workers and peasants in chains. As Tricontinental reminds us
<https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-the-bandung-spirit/>, sovereignty
without popular power is a shell. But the opportunity is just as clear:
each new payment system, fiber-optic cable, and media alliance widens the
space where people’s struggles can breathe. From the Digital Silk Road
<https://bricstoday.com/the-digital-silk-road-cybersecurity-and-tech-alliances-in-the-brics-bloc/>
to the Voices of the New World media alliance
<https://dailynewsegypt.com/2025/07/31/global-south-media-alliance-launched-in-caracas-to-counter-western-narratives/>,
infrastructures of survival are being built that—if seized by movements—can
be turned into infrastructures of emancipation.Empire will not let this
pass uncontested. It responds with coups, sanctions, propaganda, and
encirclement. But cracks spread; walls collapse. What matters now is
whether workers, peasants, youth, and popular movements force BRICS+ beyond
elite hedging toward genuine liberation. That requires weaponizing
information, claiming digital sovereignty, and demanding that sovereignty
mean not only the flag of the state but the dignity of the people.BRICS+
will not save us. But it proves that empire can be resisted, that
inevitability is a lie. In the fissures of multipolarity, the possibility
of rupture grows. Our task is to widen those cracks—through struggle,
solidarity, and clarity—until what begins as maneuver by states becomes
emancipation by peoples. The wall is broken; the road ahead is unfinished.
It is ours to build.
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