Valdai Club

This paper is the outcome of the experimental project titled “Valdai: New Generation,” which brought together young creative but accomplished researchers from Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Serbia, Kyrgyzstan, Brazil, Italy, and Indonesia. For several months, five working groups involved in the project collaborated on preparing chapters of this group paper covering high-profile stories of contemporary international politics and the global economy. The participants themselves determined each chapter’s subject matter.

On April 18-24, 1955, Bandung, Indonesia, hosted the Asia-Africa Conference that pioneered the Global South’s general approaches to international politics and economics and to the fight against colonialism and neo-colonialism.

During its years of existence, the BRICS Group has become an important international association of leading Global non-Western and Southern countries. Its appeal for many developing nations is reflected in their desire to join. Importantly, these countries perceive BRICS as a symbolic alternative to the current West-oriented world order, although BRICS always emphasises that its activities are not directed against third countries. Nevertheless, as an independent centre of power and attraction in the nonWestern world, BRICS focuses on evolving a value platform of its own.

What would be the best framework for effective Russia-India cooperation? The two countries have built a solid foundation for their cooperation, and have gone to great lengths recently to reach new heights in their relations and ensure that their regulators and institutions back these efforts. However, they have a lot of work ahead of them.

For nearly a decade and a half now, the word “transformation” has arguably been the most popular term to describe the Middle Eastern developments, including transformation of societies and economies, political systems and institutions, foreign policies and international alliances, strategies pursued by non-state and state actors, and regional and global powers.


Cooperation between Russia and India has a strong foundation, and significant efforts have been made recently to ensure that interactions between them improve in quality and gain regulatory and institutional support. Nevertheless, more work remains to be done. This is a condensed version of the report. The full version will be available on the Valdai Club’s website in February 2025.

In the middle of the 20th century, the world was built from the top down, from the peak of the hierarchical pyramid down to its base. The new system will not be that consistent, but it will be far more democratic.

Even in the original five-country format, BRICS looked like a formidable energy conglomerate. It included the world’s largest hydrocarbons exporter (Russia) and the largest consumer of energy resources (China). After the expansion on January 1, 2024, the group emerged as a real energy giant.

The emergence, in 2022, of a large group of countries, which in the Russian foreign policy discourse is referred to as the “World Majority,” came as a most meaningful event in the modern-day international life.

The United States imposed its first sanctions against Iran back in 1979 when the Iranian revolutionaries seized the American embassy and took its diplomats hostage. However, only after 2010 the restrictions that Washington and its allies imposed on Tehran for advancing its nuclear programme had a devastating effect on the Iranian economy.