BRICS and Soft Balancing:The Case of Iranian Sanctions

Abstract

Set against the post-peak legitimacy and capacity erosion of the Western-led liberal order and a gradual reallocation of power toward the East and South, this thesis re- frames the debate over whether BRICS constitutes “counter-hegemony.” Contrary to a common claim in the literature, it argues that BRICS lacks the cohesive institutional, financial, and normative toolkit required to mount a full counter-hegemonic project; instead, it practices order-internal soft balancing. The Iran sanctions file is selected as the empirical testing ground because its multilayered architecture (UNSC/IAEA alongside U.S./EU unilateral regimes), high salience, and rich observability illuminate variation across BRICS members. Using a qualitative comparative design and process tracing, the analysis identifies three instrument bundles: (i) economic strengthening and connectivity (energy trade, long-term contracts, infrastructure/credit lines); (ii) financial empowerment (local-currency/barter arrangements, state-backed insurance and payment channels); and (iii) institutional positioning and entangling diplomacy (text-softening, procedural delay, and leveraging alternative fora such as BRI–AIIB– SCO–BRICS). Member strategies diverge: China and Russia pair limited Security Council cooperation with deepening energy-finance ties; India, under “strategic autonomy,” calibrates rupee-denominated payments and Chabahar/INSTC; Brazil experiments with mediation (the 2010 Tehran initiative); South Africa adopts a cautious, IAEA-centered rhetoric. Overall, BRICS does not act as a unified counter- hegemonic bloc; it exhibits a differentiated repertoire that raises costs, delays implementation, and narrows the scope of sanctions. The theoretical contribution is to specify the scope conditions and instrument weights of soft balancing through the Iran case. The findings further show that sanctions’ effectiveness is shaped not only by the target state but also by the secondary trade-finance networks and institutional venues that sustain it, and that BRICS’ mobilization of these channels generates dynamics that increase implementation costs, induce delays, and constrain effective reach.