International Aspect Editorial Board presents to the readers experts’ views on the role of BRICS in 2023 and the prospects of BRICS studies in Russia. The authors from Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration and from Kutafin Moscow State Law University touched upon the institutional, economic and legal aspects of BRICS activities and underlined the unstudied question for researchers.

This article focuses on the features of South Africa’s foreign policy, which in 2011 became the fifth member of BRICS. South Africa’s decision to join BRIC was based on the principles of its foreign policy: promoting a multipolar, just and equitable world order, and striving for Africa’s development and prosperity. The focus is on the notion of Ubuntu and the shaping of South Africa’s foreign policy since the 1990s. Ubuntu is one of the main philosophical concepts and organizing principles of the Bantu-speaking peoples of Africa. After the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa and the democratic transition in 1994, the Ubuntu philosophy was adopted by the leaders of the country, became a tool for regulating public life, entered the practice of domestic public policy, and was firmly established as one of the key principles of foreign policy. This paper aims at identifying when the philosophy of Ubuntu became part of South Africa’s foreign policy, at determining the extent to which this notion has influenced South Africa’s foreign policy rhetoric, and at identifying the instruments of Ubuntu’s dissemination by the South African government. The methodological basis for this study was qualitative content analysis, the method of deduction and induction, synthesis, and a historical approach. During the study much attention was paid to the analysis of documents of strategic nature, which reflect the state domestic and foreign policy. Scientific novelty consists in the complex analysis of state documents and their research in terms of the content of the concept of Ubuntu and principles of Ubuntu. Such analysis has not been previously presented in the domestic science. The author’s conclusions argue for a high degree of integration of the concept of Ubuntu into South Africa’s strategic foreign policy. For about 30 years now they have been following the principles of Ubuntu in their foreign and domestic social, economic and political policies. By playing a social and regulatory role, Ubuntu has become an instrument of public diplomacy: various magazines, radio stations, national Ubuntu Awards have been created. All these tools are aimed at informing and drawing public attention to South Africa’s foreign policy, promoting the development of a multipolar world, asserting an alternative model to the Western system of individualism.

BRICS is an association of countries willing to strengthen their political influence by providing it with multilateral economic integration, contributing to solving global problems and ensuring the development of each country-member. In the documents of BRICS economic cooperation is considered as the main goal and content of relations with the support of the principle of multipolarity of the modern world, which requires legal support. Therefore, the association is based on generally recognized principles of international law, consistent with the principles of the United Nations Charter. This article also focuses on the position Russia holds in BRICS in accordance with the current political and economical environment, the list of key features of the role of Russia in BRICS is revealed. The authors paid special attention to the Russia-China partnership within BRICS. The country-members has found ways to create a single legal field in where the members interact, even if they belong to different legal families, since the development of trade requires, first of all, the harmonization of civil, antimonopoly, and customs legislation. Legal interaction also takes place in other areas, for example, in the development of law institutions related to intellectual property. So, cooperation of Russia with the bloc of these countries will soon rapidly increase and strengthen, and, as a result, BRICS may become the main market for the energy sector.

The discriminatory nature of the activities of traditional financial institutions and the growing need of the BRICS countries to find sources of financing for projects in the field of infrastructure development and sustainable development in order to increase competitiveness determines the significance of the activities of the New Development Bank (the NDB). The purpose of the study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the NDB’s activities in terms of the results of project financing in the BRICS countries and from the point of view of a financial analysis of the Bank’s main financial reporting ratios. The article gives an assessment of the growth in the scale of the NDB’s activities, provides data on the nature of the distribution of financial resources among participating countries, as well as on the areas of project implementation. Based on the assessment of the financial statements of the NDB through the analysis of the Profit and Loss Statement, as well as the calculation of profitability, coverage, liquidity and solvency ratios, an assessment of the financial efficiency of the NDB was carried out. Based on the results of the study, we made the following conclusions. Firstly, the expansion of the NDB’s activities is in line with the Bank’s concept and the interests of the BRICS countries and demonstrates financial and institutional flexibility. Secondly, regarding the suspension of transactions in the Russian Federation and the limited shares of new members in the authorized capital, the thesis about the equality of opportunities of the participating countries in relation to the NDB is rather controversial. Thirdly, while maintaining a positive profitability, the financial efficiency of the NDB’s activities shows a downward trend, which, however, has the potential to be smoothed by expanding and diversifying sources of financing